Spamhuntress

I’ve seen quite a few thoroughly spammed blogs lately. So badly, that I fear the owners are giving up and not even thinking about cleaning them.

The newer versions of Movable Type are very easy to clean. Both comments and trackbacks. They should be cleaned from within the admin interface. No tutorials needed really.

For Wordpress I was surprised to find that only the last 20 comments/trackbacks were visible. The plugin mentioned in the first comment below will help you go back further. You find the comments by going to Manage, then Comments.

For older versions of many blog softwares, cleaning is very hard. I still remember B2. I had to open each post and see if there were any comments. So I’d need one window open to the admin interface, and the other to the blog itself. I gave up on that after a while.

Enter the solution for those who won’t or can’t update older software:

Delete unwanted comments and trackbacks directly from the database. This is most easily done with phpMyAdmin, which is relatively easy to update for those who have old style hosts. It’s usually included in cpanel. If you don’t see it, ask your webhost.

Find the right database. Maybe do an export of the entire database to be safe first. Then..

MT, my version:
Go to Structure, click on the Browse icon for mt_comment and remove the spam comments. Do the same for mt_tbping.

WP, my version:
Structure, click on Browse icon for wp_comments.
Comments and Trackbacks share the same table in the database.

For other software, browser tables until you find the right one. Like I said, do a backup first (export, sql, save file).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 13th, 2005 at 11:02 am and is filed under Preachy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.