osama i. al-dosary

I stopped allowing commenting on my blog about a year ago when I found that I had over 7 thousand spam comments. I didn’t know how to stop the spam until recently I’ve added the spam utility through WordPress, called Akismet.

Now I have the task of deleting 7′000 comments, which cannot be done all at once through WordPress. Through WordPress you can only mass delete 20 posts at a time.

I’m not very familiar with WordPress, but I found how to delete all the spam comments. Basically its done by running the following SQL command through phpMyAdmin:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved='0'

(Which I got from this helpful link forum posting:
WordPress › Support » deleting over 10,000 spam comments without using moderation page)

Interestingly command didn’t delete the comments that I had approved, so it seems the “0″ in the command means: unapproved”.

When I moved my blog to WordPress I read some best practices that said I should not require users to register to in order to post comments, claiming that I didn’t need to worry about spam. So I left it open for anyone to anonymously post. It worked out fine for the first year or so. Then about a month ago I got over 4′000 spam comments within a few days.

I stopped the open policy, but now I’m stuck with all these spam comments that I’m not sure how I’m going to get rid of.

I wonder why the sudden rise of the spam comments. I’m guessing that spammers have been able to get around the text guessing game that WordPress uses, somehow.

I was having lunch with friends the other day at Fudrucker’s and decided to order a burger, while highlighting that I’m trying to do a survey of the best hamburgers in Riyadh (that I know of.) I was immediately reprimanded that I didn’t blog about this topic.

I started apprehensively talking about my hamburger experience, and quickly faced disagreement. This made me question blogging about it all together. But I will do so some time later in another entry.

I now have blog-by-email fully working in order run the update script
automatically.
Every time I send a new blog by email, the script “wp-mail.php” needs to
be run to update the blog with the new entry. In order to have the
script run periodically, I used the ‘cron’ command
to invoke the script every few
minutes. The command I used to invoke the script was the following:

wget -O /dev/null http://fakebucket.com/blog/wp-mail.php 2>/dev/null
wget: is a command to retrieve a web and saves as a file.
‘-O /dev/null’: means save the the retrieved page to ‘null’, or in
otherwords, get rid of what has been retrieved.
‘2>/dev/null’ means cron should through away the command output.

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Apparently the blog-by-email feature doesn’t support HTML emails, nor embedded images. I noticed that attachements are uploaded to the the ‘uploads’ directory.

It works!

I did face a problem though. It was not in the documentation, which is the you have to put the full email@domain.com in the username field. I got the answer from here.

I’m posting this entry from the Firefox Extension “Deepest Sender “. I’m trying to figure out the easiest way to post into WordPress, now that I’ve moved away from Blogger, which was very convenient to use.

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[Edit]:

Now that I’ve tried, it seems that it doesn’t add much to posting directly through the blog. I just found this Javascript WordPress posting link , which is much more useful. I bookmark the script in my browser, and whenever I stumble upon a site that I want to blog about, I simply click the bookmark, and it opens a post box with the link in the body and the title of the page in the blog post title.

Now I’m going to try figure out the ‘post using email’ feature.

I’ve moved my blog due to privacy concerns after Google has taken over blogger. You can find my humble blog at  http://blog.dosary.net/,  http://dosary.net/blog/ or  http://fakebucket.com/blog/.