So I have thousands of spam comments on my website, and I've turned off comments in order to prevent even more. I'm slowly getting rid of the 30,000+ comments already there by selecting the box at the top and deleting 20 at a time. Is there a quicker way to get rid of them? A 'select all' button maybe or something in the settings that I've overlooked?
You should be able to delete the comments directly out of the wp-comments table using SQL. I did a quick search and it looks like this is the case. Backup your database before you start deleting stuff from it and make sure you download a copy if possible. For your reference: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/is-there-a-way-to-delete-all-comments-at-once https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-remove-thousads-of-approved-spam-comments You could put a WHERE clause on your query to delete only comments posted between a start and end time (comment_date) so you will not delete comments outside of when you got hit with spam. There are also plugins to help you delete comments. https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/delete-all-comments But that will delete all of your comments.
@billzo, I'm afraid that's too complicated for me at the moment, but thank you for your message! #newbie
I've used this one before with good success https://wordpress.org/plugins/batch-comment-spam-deletion/ of course, the spam might just return unless you have some measure in place to prevent them getting approved in the first place
Backup your database first. See WordPress Backups. The can use phpMyAdmin to execute this SQL DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 0 Of course if your comments table is prefixed with wp_ you will need to use the correct table name.