From spam to comment (to baked beans)
A few regular readers may recall the tragic guff comments debacle of 2005. Turns out the whole thing was less tragedy than Monty Python.
Comments thought to have been dropped off the twin peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro were in actuality hiding out in the Viking sketch. Or in technical terms, the little blacklist glitch forced WordPress to mark everything coming through as spam. The good of this is real comments were saved, albeit they were not available through WordPress (rather I stumbled across them in the database). The bad is they were mixed in with a few thousand real spam comments, meaning I had to slog through the whole mess to find the diamonds. So to speak.
Except for a few duplicates and numerous test comments, I’ve reinstated the nearly lost reader contributions. Which is something I’m glad I don’t have to do every day.
Author: Kaf Oseo
Categories: szub-Limn
Comments: (2) · Leave a comment · Comments RSS2 · Trackback URL
Next time, use Chris J. Davis’ Spam Nuker to easily recover all comments that have been “deleted” and marked as “spam”.
http://www.chrisjdavis.org/2005/03/03/mass-delete-15/
Chris’ Spam Nuke is useful, but selecting honest to goodness comments in amongst the crap still requires manually digging through it all—which is what I did. Choice of interface was certainly less user-friendly compared to SN but in this case I needed more of the comment data to better finger the spam.