Well, before my active return to the blogosphere, I had occasionally opened the Admin panel on my blog from time to time to check my stats and for new comments. Thing is, I have the One Click Updater installed, which is a great little plugin for WordPress which notifies you about updates for your plugins and also installs them for you.

Also, WordPress can now update itself, a feature which was missing some releases back. All I need to do, is click the Update button. So, the point is that on one of my occasional forays into the Admin panel, I upgraded both WordPress and Akismet.

Akismet is an anti-spam plugin, which checks all comments before allowing them to be displayed. It checks for stuff like a suspiciously large number of links in the text, repeating text patters etc. But that’s besides the point. The fact is that Akismet blocks a good amount of spam. To get the actual statistics, you should head over to their website, and check the upper-right corner.

So, the problem was that all this updating shenanigans, coupled with the fact that I wasn’t particular about which order I did it in, meant that Akismet was not enabled for a period of about two weeks. So, when I bothered to check up the comments yesterday, you can imagine my worry when I saw 20,000 comments in the list.

In the Approved list.

Now this is really bad news, because even if they had been awaiting moderation, I could’ve just re-enabled Akismet, and asked it to recheck the moderation queue for spam. But the fact that all the spam was approved, meant that I’d have to manually to add it to the moderation queue and then recheck.

This was problem was compounded by the fact that for some reason, only one comment was showing up in the Comments page in the Admin panel. Later, I found out it was because of my theme. If you encounter a similar problem, I suggest you switch to Kubrick till the problem is sorted, or your last working theme.

Once I did that, I could see more comments. But the thing is, even 20 per page with 20,000 comments means a hell lot of pages to unapprove. So, I had to increase the comments per page to something like 250. Any more than that, and I would get errors like URI Too Long, or a server memory limit warning. So, even with 250 per page, it took me a very, very long time to get all the comments on the moderation queue.

The spam was pretty much standard : Viagra, Cialis, sex and some other meds I had never heard about…

Anyway, with a 256kbps connection, it was still agonizingly slow, loading up all the comments, and I finished it all by 4AM! And this just goes on to show exactly how valuable Akismet is for bloggers around the world. Even a single day without can mean hell.

Tags: Internet, Reviews, Software, Wordpress