A few fellow bloggers have posted comments to my rant regarding our frustration at comment spam. It’s a big issue that’s affecting a lot of bloggers, and is really stifling the ability of readers to give feedback on articles. I had a similar problem and have managed to bring it to manageable level. I’ll give a brief overview of what I did, and I hope to expand this article in the near future to go into specific details on the steps taken. But someone with a little bit of knowedge can fill in the blanks with this basic description.
Doing what I did requires some familiarity with mySQL or whatever database your blog is using to store its content. Many bloggers are intimate with this stuff, but others only play with and see the interface without every bothering with the details, so it’s important to make this distinction.
So picture it: I see 300+ spam ads in all of my articles’ comments, advertising online poker sites. While cursing the cretins who have nothing better to do than gamble (online, no less, without any casino or among-friends ambiance) I got tired of deleting comments manually, one by one, Just as I was about to give up and turn comments off for all articles, I said, ‘wait a minute, theres this massive database lying underneath, with very powerful search capabilities. I don’t need to do this manually!’
So, I logged into the database as an administrator and just searched for the string matching our most prolific spammer, “lilo@suddenenlightenment.us” And lo and behold, all of the comment entries with that address popped right up. I highlighted all the entries, hit the DEL button, and the comments were instantly gone from the website.
If you’re a blogger with a similar problem, then with a little help from whoever is administering your server, you can get direct access to the database and make changes to the entries, and the ability to perform searches and mass comment deletions. It seems like a wide majority of bloggers are using blog engines that are built on PHP and MySQL, making the job easy.
There are a couple of tools that give you direct access to MySQL. The most common is phpMyAdmin, but I found it’s not quick enough for my taste. So, I downloaded and installed MySQL Control Center, instead. It provides a graphical interface, makes searches easy, and if you’ve used MS Access, you’ll get the hang of it very quickly. Best of all, it’s a free download.
A word of caution: back up the database before you go tinkering around with it (MySQL Control has instructions for backing up a database in the help files). That way you can at least go back to where you were before if something horribly goes wrong with your edit. And ALWAYS ask a knowledgeable person for help (server admins are often good for this) if you don’t know what you’re doing.
