I Just Learned Something Cool
I just had some asshat dump 591 pieces of comment spam in my moderation cue. I shut off comments. I placed redirects based on his IP into my scripts. I edited my .htaccess file and banned him from my site.
All of this — to no avail. I think the only thing that slowed him down was Tar Pit, which denies comments that come from the same IP too quickly. I could have had four or five times as many spam comments.
Fortunately, I know a little PHP.
Dreading opening my moderation queue and WordPress‘ nasty clumsiness in handling 500+ comment spams at once (there’s no “Select All” option), I went into PHPMyAdmin and wrote a simple select statement. I brought up all 591 (or so) spam comments and simply deleted them from the database directly.
When I opened my comment moderation queue, I only had a couple from folks that I already know, which I allowed. Took me only a few minutes.
WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! I AM A PROFESSIONAL.
Seriously. Don’t do this, because you might screw up and delete the whole thing. Or mung it up so badly that you’ll have to re-install everything — and lose your blog in the process. Before you try to do something like I have just described, CALL SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO DO THIS WITHOUT MUNGING EVERYTHING UP!
I should write a plugin to do this very thing so that you don’t have to worry about it. Hmmmm…
ADDENDUM — I can’t fathom, for the life of me, why some idiot would spam a website that has Comment Moderation turned on. You don’t get the Google juice you seek. You don’t get squat: WordPress keeps everything in the database under wraps until you decide what to show when. All you end up doing is wasting your (and someone else’s) time.
And you know what they say: “Time is Money.”
