3,000 spam comments in my wordpress

  • Hello All,

    I have a personal website I use a broadcaster to host all of my audio and video files. I do not check the wordpress much because I do not make many changes.

    Today I went into wordpress and found over 3,000 comments. All a bunch of spammy crap.

    Anyway, I reached out to my hosting service and they want to charge me $60 to fix this. I believe, with your help, I can fix it on my own without their help.

    They said they ‘IT Department turned email notifications off for your website at the server level as the sheer volume of spam was getting our servers blacklisted and that is no good. They informed me that they cannot turn that feature back on until the spam issue is resolved.’

    Is this something I can fix on my own, or do I need to pay them? They factor in only 30 minutes of work, so I’m thinking I can pull it off…

    Thanks
    Pete

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • You should be able to activate something like Akismet to prevent future problems. The rest… /wp-admin/edit-comments.php – If all of the comments on your site are spam, just select all on each page, move to trash. Rinse / repeat until you’re done.

    Might check out the Anti-spam plugin. https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/anti-spam/

    It’s has stopped pretty much all automated spam before Akismet even looks at it.

    Thread Starter pmundo01

    (@pmundo01)

    I went to install Akismet and it told me that another anti-spam was already on there and I should deactivate akismet right away. So I did. Now I am trying to delete all the messages… but I go to the comments page (it says 1,600 pending … 1,300 spam) but only 1 comment is showing and it freezes my wordpress.

    Every other part of wordpress works. Not sure if the host server froze me out or something? Any suggestions on this??? Thanks guys!

    Thread Starter pmundo01

    (@pmundo01)

    An update from my server… can you guys help? Here is what he sent me…

    “We have added no plugins for spam, but perhaps the WordPress Theme has something built into it. As for the comments issue, I actually went in there initially and tried to delete all of the spam messages but half way through the 3000 comments my window froze up as well. One of the spam comments on that page is causing browsers to crash, so the only way to remove it is to have a developer run a database script to delete all comments from there.

    Even if you got this spam plugin installed, I’m not sure if it will create enough trust with our IT Engineers to remove the mail block on the server. It’s quite expensive to have a server blacklisted multiple times, so they would rather we fix the spam issue so we know for sure its going to work on the server side.

    If you are able turn off commenting completely and add a captcha to your contact form, then I could reduce the cost of the estimate by 50%. Then our team could go in and remove the rest of the spam comments and update the server to allow mail again. From there, we’ll send a test message to verify and all should be good. Or we could do it all for the original estimate we sent out.”

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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