[rmfo-blogs.com]: About

At present, [rmfo-blogs.com] Weblogs are powered by WordPress v1.2. At the release of 1.2, comment spam was on the rise in the Weblog community as a whole, and WordPress, with its rising popularity, was quickly becoming a target of comment spammers.

The following is a tutorial of how to rid yourself of comment spam in WordPress v1.2. There are screen caps that have unimportant or distracting information blurred out; the focus of each step will be highlighted clearly in yellow. I don’t have 1337 PhotoShop skills, but hey … you’re not paying me to write this, are you?

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Step 0

Step 0 finds the user having just been comment spammed. This could be an overnight situation, or it could be ongoing. Presumably you’re too busy wasting time working to get the comment spam dealt with right away, so you’ve got a nifty little cache of it built up. At the time of my writing this entry, I had 100+ comments in my moderation queue.

The following is the fastest and easiest route to clearing all the comment spam you may have.

Step 0: Go to “Edit” in the WP UI.

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Step 1

Step 1: Go to the “Awaiting Moderation” tab.

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Step 2

Step 2: Mouse-over and highlight the first IP that you see in the list of comments awaiting moderation. You can do this by holding down the left mouse button and dragging it through the text of the IP number. You can then right-click your mouse, select Copy from the dialog box, and carry on. Alternately, you can write the number down, although this takes more time.

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Step 3

Step 3: Click on the “Comments” tab, then select “Mass Edit Mode”.

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Step 4

Step 4: In the highlighted search box, paste/type in the offending IP address.

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Step 5

Step 5: Scroll down through the results of that search. 99.995% of the time, these will all be comment spams. Make sure that you don’t delete a legitimate comment! You can keep any legitimate comments in your queue by checking the box next to it. As you can see here, we have a bunch of spammers, so we’ll leave those unchecked.

Either way you go, get to the bottom and click the “Invert Checkbox Selection” link. This will invert the selections—de-selecting any comments you want saved while selecting all the spam.

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Step 6

Step 6: Move your mouse over to the right hit the “Delete Checked Comments” button. All those nasty comment spams will disappear.

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To clear your entire cache of comment spams quickly, go back to Step 1 and repeat the steps all the way to Step 6 until you are finished with the spams. If you have any legitimate comments in amongst the spam, you can approve them in the screen achieved in Step 1.

It is my hope that this brief tutorial will help you in deleting comment spam on your [rmfo-blogs.com] Weblog.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 14th, 2004 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Stopping Comment Spam. 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.