TechKnack

One thing I’ve learned in running my own blog is that spam-bots really, really like open forms. I’m sure experienced bloggers will smile (and say “that’s all?”) when I say that I get probably no less than 5 spam comments per day. With WordPress, it’s simple to be rid of spam — just click the comment’s “spam” link in the moderation section. Unfortunately, with so many spam and so few real comments, the spam link becomes second nature to click. And today I accidentally spammed a legit comment. Oops.

There doesn’t seem to be much info on Google regarding un-spamming comments, so I thought I’d look into the database to see what I could do. Comments are held in the MySQL table “[wp-prefix]comments” (the default is “wp_comments”). One of the columns in that table is “comment_approved”. Unmoderated comments have a 0 in this column. Approved comments have a 1. And marked-as-spam comments have “spam”. To un-spam a comment, use your MySQL client (be it phpMyAdmin or the MySQL command line program) to edit the comment_approved field back to 0 (or 1) in the appropriate comment’s row. Unfortunately, “delete” really means “delete” — a deleted comment is removed from the database altogether, so you’ll have to scrounge legit comments back together from the emails that WP sends.

I really don’t see why the WP devs didn’t build an un-spam function into the WP admin. It seems like an obvious addition, given the structure of the database.