Blogging-Related Bleg
It was pointed out to me that a number of my old posts from my unlamented Typepad era are full of comment spam that carried over into the wordpress database. My current comment spam filtering for new comments works fine. Does anyone know of a solution that will actually go back through the data base and mine out old spam?
CGHill:
If you're using Akismet, you might consider going to the Edit Comments screen, display All, and then hit the Check for Spam button.
December 3, 2009, 4:28 pmDavid Z:
I'd recommend the same as CGHill (above), if you're looking to clean it out for aesthetic purposes.
Practically speaking, however, I don't think it's a big deal. Most of the blogging apps like WP and TypePad insert a rel=nofollow tag into any hyperlinks posted to comments. With that in mind, "comment spam" shouldn't count against you in terms of SEO/pageranking/etc.
December 3, 2009, 6:05 pmMike Heins:
If you send me a MySQL dump (i.e. mysqldump wordpress_database comments_table > /tmp/comments.mysqldump) then I would be happy to scan it and return it sans spam. 8-)
December 3, 2009, 10:38 pmJesse:
Warren, I went back and did some checking and came up with this thread from about 2 years ago that people seem to be happy with:
http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2007/03/06/asking-you-filtering-past-comment-spam-in-wordpress/
They use a plugin called SpamKarma 2 that works with Askimet that goes through all your old comments and attempts to filter out the spam.
Might be worth a try. I also used the MySQL trick (no pun intended re: Climategate) that Mike H. references above.
Good luck and will continue to enjoy your postings regardless of the old spam. ;)
- Jesse
December 4, 2009, 7:32 am