Too many comments

Hi All...

Im aware that there is no way to delete ALL comments in one swoop in the admin pages, however is there a way of digging into the file structure within terminal to delete them....

I have over 1200 comments of spam!

Any advice on reducing or stopping spam to my site would also be appreciated...

Best wishes

Del

Comments

  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    You have to delete them in your database using a tool like phpmyadmin or you can use a mysql query manually.

    There are several spamfilter available, the 3rd party Akismet one is still maintained so I would try that. Also I would try to enable captcha.

    If these are human spammers it will be hard to fight against them itself. We get loads on the forum as well.
  • You will have to delete them from the database using the admin panel unless you want to tick them all manually in the backend. I had the same problem and what I did was to go though the comments and find a piece or two of info (website name, certain words, repeating ip's etc) and block them using the spam filter options. Then once I had found the info I needed to cut down on the next wave of spam I would just take the datetime from the oldest and newest comments and delete them from phpmyadmin using,

    `SELECT * FROM 'table' WHERE 'column' BETWEEN 'yyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss' AND 'yyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss'`

    Obviously you will want to DELETE not SELECT but better to be safe first. :P

    I also made a few changes to my simple spam filter so that I could enter partial IPs but I "think" you can get the same result from putting them in the section for pattern matching.

    Just keep after the machine posted spam and you will weed out most of the problems after a few tries. I really found that by reading the messages posted then isolating the part that the spammer wanted to get posted and filtering from there worked wonders. I went from about 200 or so a day to a few a week. Mostly they were just new ones that needed to be added into the backend filtering.

    Good luck with it.
    edit: Acrylian beat me to it.
  • many thanks...

    The Captcha tha comes with zenphoto is installed so not sure how they are hgetting past... I have a Akismet account so I'll plug that in

    Thanks again

    Del
  • Mark R

    Many thanks.. Did it through myadminphp... 1200 comments gone...

    Del
  • Captcha does not filter spam, it at best blocks robots.
  • Glad to be of some help Del.
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