mykmelez

I finally figured out a decent way to despam the 56 posts on our installation (which accumulated a significant amount of spam before we locked down commenting with moderation). It involved working around pagination as follows:

1. Go to the Edit Posts page and select a post to despam.

2. Search in the page for the “Show more comments” link (which appears at the bottom of the Discussions section) and load it. Repeat until the link no longer appears in the page. This results in all comments being loaded into the page, so you can review them all at once.

3. Scroll to the top of the list of comments. Read through them from top to bottom (oldest to newest), clicking the “Spam” link for the ones that are spam (the link appears in the comment when you mouse over it).

Note: If you have to load the URL associated with a comment to determine whether or not it’s spam, load it in a new tab; if you load it in the existing tab and then go back to the Edit Post page, it will refresh itself, undoing the results of the “Show more comments” links you clicked.

This is another example of how pagination hinders rather than helps a common task. If all comments were loaded into the Edit Post page (or if there were a separate page listing all comments for the post), you wouldn’t have to repeatedly find and click the Show more comments link to get all comments loaded into the page, and you wouldn’t run the risk of messing it up and having to redo that whole process because you loaded a link to another page and then went back.