This is always a problem. Especially when you want to keep the good comments. So did you get an email for each new comment? If so you can browse through them to look for URLs that are common to a bunch of them, then put that in your antispam tab so it will find the offending matches. BTW if you got hit with stuff.foo.com and thing.foo.com ban .foo.com instead of the subdomain portion. You'll catch more junk that way. Also sometimes they comment with a very specific sentence, so you can catch junk that way. The longer the string of text the better. For example "Thanks webmaster. I will visit your site often!" might net you a bunch of crap comments.

One person who had this issue and didn't mind losing some good comments decided to ban "http:" and be done with it. Almost every spam comment you get will have a URL in it, but often so do nice comments.

Good luck with it.

EdB wrote:

This is always a problem. Especially when you want to keep the good comments. So did you get an email for each new comment? If so you can browse through them to look for URLs that are common to a bunch of them, then put that in your antispam tab so it will find the offending matches. BTW if you got hit with stuff.foo.com and thing.foo.com ban .foo.com instead of the subdomain portion. You'll catch more junk that way. Also sometimes they comment with a very specific sentence, so you can catch junk that way. The longer the string of text the better. For example "Thanks webmaster. I will visit your site often!" might net you a bunch of crap comments.

One person who had this issue and didn't mind losing some good comments decided to ban "http:" and be done with it. Almost every spam comment you get will have a URL in it, but often so do nice comments.

Good luck with it.

I tried the "http:" idea but it kept coming up with a server host error.

Katya wrote:

I tried the "http:" idea but it kept coming up with a server host error.

Was that "Not Acceptable"? Then it's probably mod_security choking on the "http:" param value. Just for info..

You could try ".com/" then net and org to see if that'll snag the comment spammers. I'm pretty sure it'll also get mad over every hit in your hitlog, but you can uncheck the box for deleting those. Likewise the boxes for locally banning and reporting. Hmmm... You could also use your summary tab to delete all the hitlog info from each day until your hitlog is empty, then try to ban ".com/" and so on.

Oh that ban won't catch everything because not all spammers will have the trailing slash for an individual webpage, but it'll catch a lot.

What I do is using the URL with the offensive comment notification, go to where the comment is and delete it. I have realized that spammers put comments in posts that have pictures.

How do I remove all existing comments - I have none that I wish to keep. Just updated the program and the summary tab is only showing one day. i have hundreds of spam messages.

There is no way that I know of to remove all comments at once. To use the antispam blacklist system for this you will have to find common text across the comments and 'ban' that, then uncheck the boxes that don't apply.