Spam – 42k comments
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Hi – I woke up this morning to 42k spams comments in my spam folder. I am trying to delete them in bulk, but am getting a 503 error.
3 questions:
1. How can I do a bulk delete
2. How can I prevent this from happening again? Is there a bot protector?
3. Can WP.com restore a database?thanks all!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I’m so sorry you have experienced this. I will flag this thread for Staff attention. Please be patient while waiting for them to sort this for you.
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There should be an “empty spam” button that will delete all of them. It could take a while for them to all get deleted, so be patient. If you still get errors, then wait for staff to reply here.
And congratulations. You might have a record – or at least in my experience. I’ll no longer complain when I wake up to 400+ in my spam queue.
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Sadly you can’t prevent it. Something like 97% of comments are spam. It sounds like you were hit by a overachieving bot and Akismet will get them.
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@TSP
This is the all time highest number of for spam comments I have every heard of happening overnight. -
Yes, for some reason this blog (I manage several at a university) seems to get hit all the time. Usually it is a few hundred. But I checked the timestamp and it was every minute.
I’d love to prevent this in the future (for obvious reasons…). Does Askimet delete comments are 30 days?
Thanks for both of your comments.
Catherine
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I assume your are referring to the blog linked to your username as you did not refer to another one or provide a link. What puzzles me is that it’s a “private” blog. So apparently the URL has been “leaked”. Or was the blog visibility “private” and then you changed it after this happened?
See here Settings > Discussion for default Discussion settings
Other comment settings
Automatically close comments on articles older than __daysSee here for creating a comment blacklist.
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EDIT: Or was the blog visibility “public” and then you changed it to “private” after this happened?
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No, this blog is totally different under another WP login. I didn’t want to publicly post it because it is a university one.
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The blog that was spammed is under another WP login. I didn’t want to publicly post it because it is a university one.
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Oh, oh then we need to clarify whether or not it is a free blog being free hosted by WordPress.COM or if it’s a self-hosted WordPress.ORG install. We provide support ONLY for free hosted WordPress.COM blogs on this forum. If this is actually about a WordPress.ORG install then we cannot help. It runs on different software and you have to post here > http://wordpress.ORG/support/
Please read this WordPress.COM versus WordPress.ORG
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Okay then you will have to provide the URL to Staff via email when they respond to this thread. I have tried posting the email address twice today and on the first occasion it was redacted and on the second occasion it was removed.
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Let’s see if the bot likes my leaving the support email any better
Here’s the email address support@wordpress.com Be sure you include all details.
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~~auxclass
Well that’s a peeve off for sure because when I posted the email address into another thread what happened is exactly what I stated above — aaararraghh! -
~~TT – the forum does work in strange ways some days – TSP had almost all of his Posts go to spam for a few days – I had a few days that my stuff got went into spam for a while – took me a while to see what the symptoms were to even recognize it.
Have a nice day
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I’m sorry for the trouble – that’s certainly a lot of spam! It looks like you’ve already deleted the comments, so I don’t have access to them to see what you were dealing with specifically.
However, I do have a couple general tips to help prevent this from happening in the future:
If a lot of the spam comments have a common string of text, I suggest adding that string to your blacklist:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#comment-blacklist(You can use the comment author’s name, IP address, web site, as well as the comment itself. Please make sure the string of text is not something contained in non-spam comments. For example, if you enter “press” as a blacklisted word, “WordPress” will match.)
Also, please be sure to mark spam comments as spam instead of just deleting them. Our Akismet anti-spam engine tries to learn from spam comments so as to be able to detect them in the future.
For more information about dealing with unwanted comments, visit:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/unwanted-comments/
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