Bulk Management of Pending, Approved, Unapproved & Spam WordPress Comments

If you haven’t yet installed a anti comment spam plugin like Akismet or anti spam bee you may be in for a shock.

Recently i installed the Livefyre comments plugin and made the mistake of allowing non Livefyre users to comment on my blog posts.

This caused a huge amount of automated comment spam, which, by the way, hasn’t effected my search engine rankings, but doesn’t look very nice.

Deleting comment spam one page at a time isn’t an exciting job and can take hours if you have thousands of automated spam comments.

The reason for this is you’ll find once you open your comments page that WordPress only allows you to manage 20 comments at a time using different Bulk Actions like Move to Trash or Mark as Spam.

As you can see from the screenshot, 50 pages of comments which includes over 1000 comments requires a more efficient solution.

One method you can use to clean up your comments is available in your MySQL database manager, PHPMyAdmin.

Bulk Delete Pending Comments Using PHP MyAdmin

• Login to cPanel and scroll down to the Database section
• Click PHPMyAdmin and select the database for your WordPress site which has the bulk comments
• Click the SQL tab and enter: delete from wp_comments where comment_approved=”0″;

Bulk Delete Spam Comments Using PHP MyAdmin

• Login to cPanel and scroll down to the Database section
• Click PHPMyAdmin and select the database for your WordPress site which has the bulk comments
• Click the SQL tab and enter: delete from wp_comments where comment_approved=”spam”;

Bulk Delete Approved Non Spam Comments

• Login to cPanel and scroll down to the Database section
• Click PHPMyAdmin and select the database for your WordPress site which has the bulk comments
• Click the SQL tab and enter: delete from wp_comments where comment_approved=”1″;

WordPress Discussion Settings for Managing Comments

Make sure you have setup your Discussion settings correctly to manage WordPress comment spam and legitimate comments which add value to your content.

Here’s some of the most important settings i suggest you take a look at.

I’ve now reinstalled the Akismet plugin which is one of the best ways to wipe out comment spam entirely.

Got any better solutions for bulk managing comments in WordPress?