Once in awhile a WordPress site gets left to the wolves and becomes overrun by spam comments. Perhaps you set up an installation and forgot to install Akismet or some other spam-blocking plugin. If you neglected your site for a significant length of time, it’s likely that you’ll return to hundreds, if not thousands, of spam comments.
The problem is that servers tend to crap out on you when you attempt to batch delete that many WordPress comments at once. Pippin Williamson just released a new plugin that helps to tackle this problem.
Batch Comment Spam Deletion works by modifying the the “Empty Spam” action in WordPress to process the spam deletion in batches instead of all at once.
With this plugin in place, you’ll be able to delete hundreds of thousands of spam comments at once without killing your server. The plugin keeps you in the loop with status updates as it processes batches of spam:
I tested Batch Comment Spam Deletion and it breezed through deleting nearly 800 spam comments with no issues. Another user reports having deleted 18,500 spam comments on the first run. Although this is a relatively new plugin, you can bet that it’s rock solid. Its creator, Pippin Williamson, is also the author of the popular Easy Digital Downloads plugin and 54 other free plugins hosted on WordPress.org.
If you need to do some serious housekeeping in your comments, install Batch Comment Spam Deletion before eradicating your spam problem. Your server will thank you. You can set the clean-up process to run and come back later to zero spam comments. This beats spending hours trying to manually process thousands of batches of spam.
Thanks Sarah for advising on this new plugin.
Regards,
Ray