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Spam - 42k comments

  1. cmurphyphoto
    Member

    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 cmurphyphoto.wordpress.com.

  2. timethief
    Member

    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.

  3. thesacredpath
    Member

    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.

  4. thesacredpath
    Member

    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.

  5. timethief
    Member

    @TSP
    This is the all time highest number of for spam comments I have every heard of happening overnight.

  6. cmurphyphoto
    Member

    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

  7. timethief
    Member

    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 __days

    See here for creating a comment blacklist.

  8. timethief
    Member

    EDIT: Or was the blog visibility "public" and then you changed it to "private" after this happened?

  9. cmurphyphoto
    Member

    No, this blog is totally different under another WP login. I didn't want to publicly post it because it is a university one.

  10. cmurphyphoto
    Member

    The blog that was spammed is under another WP login. I didn't want to publicly post it because it is a university one.

  11. timethief
    Member

    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

  12. cmurphyphoto
    Member

    Yes, it is wordpress.com hosted blog

  13. cmurphyphoto
    Member

    Should I post this under the other login? Do I need to post the link?

  14. timethief
    Member

    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.

  15. cmurphyphoto
    Member

    OK, thanks a lot for your time!

  16. auxclass
    Member

    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.

  17. cmurphyphoto
    Member

    OK, thanks a lot for your time!

  18. timethief
    Member

    ~~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!

  19. auxclass
    Member

    ~~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

  20. chrisrudzki
    Staff

    @cmurphyphoto:

    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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