Delete your Akismet Spam Comments
When our clients want to blog, we put them on Wordpress. Wordpress is awesome blogging software that we love and support. The creators of wordpress also have developed a plugin that blocks comment spam called Akismet. This help keeps the blog clean and professional.
So here’s a quick tip for any of our clients or any readers who use Wordpress with the Akismet Spam plugin. Periodically, go into the Comments section under your Admin login. There will be a link in the dark blue bar labeled “Akisment Spam”. Click on that link and click the Delete All button (shown below).
The reason you need to do this is fairly technical, so read on if you are interested.
I have a blog that receives a fair amount of traffic. Recently, I had to switch hosting providers for this blog - it’s a personal hobby blog, so I don’t host it at Twelve Horses. When I requested a backup of the database from the previous hosting provider, the SQL file was 22 megabytes. Of this 22 MBs of database space, 19 MBs of it were the comments. And of the 19 MBs of comments, only about 70 kilobytes were real comments (not spam). Due to the size, I had a very difficult time trying to get this database backup into my new hosting provider’s database. Since I didn’t delete all my Akismet spam on a regular basis, I had to try and work with a 19 MB text file to get rid of the spam comments before I could import the real comments. If you’ve ever worked with large text files, you can understand how difficult it was.
So keep your database small and nimble. Delete your spam comments on a regular basis.
June 8th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Thanks for reminding me. I had almost 4,000. An important thing to distinguish though is that under the new Wordpress release you can now teach it what is spam and what is not. So, for those comments that do not immediately end up as “Akismet Spam,” but they are spam, it is best not to delete them but “mark them as spam.” If you don’t have this feature obviously it is time to upgrade to the new version.
June 11th, 2007 at 5:54 am
Doesn’t Akismet automatically delete your spam after a few days anyway? I know mine gets deleted daily, but that’s because I get about 3,000+ spam messages a day.
June 11th, 2007 at 9:43 am
There is a setting under the Akismet Configuration (Admin -> Plugins -> Akismet Configuration) to automatically delete comments that are a month old. So if you get alot like Stoney, it’s probably a good idea to turn this on.