Comment for Michael Carden about comment spam

I read on PLOA that Michael Carden briefly tried to open his blog for comments, only to find:

The WordPress UI balked at deleting 194,000 (okay, I ignored it for a while) comment spams. I had to dig in as admin and run a fun sql query on the database to delete all 47 meg of them.

I guess I’ve got a couple of suggestions for Michael to make his life a little easier should he decide to try again.

  1. Akismet has an option to “Automatically discard spam comments older than a month“, that might help (though it’d be nice to be able to adjust the time).
  2. Run, do not walk, to Rich Boakes most excellent Worst Offenders plugin. This will both group comments for deletion based on various criteria but also (if you have permission) add Apache “Deny From” rules for the offending IP addresses. It’s also worth bumping the number of IP addresses it can ban up, Donna’s blog is up to over 8,000 at the moment!
  3. There are also tools like Bad Behaviour to try and catch bots before they get to you and if you are a member of Project Honeypot then there is the http:BL WordPress Plugin to check and block IP’s listed as baddies there.

Anyway, I hope that helps some people out.

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