gemmapeter.co.uk

After finding many (+1000) comment spams in my wordpress blog I took a look at my database tables. After marking something as spam it still lurks around in the wordpress database (table wp_comments)

SELECT COUNT(*), comment_approved FROM wp_comments GROUP BY comment_approved;

+----------+------------------+
| COUNT(*) | comment_approved |
+----------+------------------+
|       68 | 1                |
|     3339 | spam             |
+----------+------------------+

If you want to reduce the database space that your wordpress is taking up I recommend permenently deleting spam comments using the sql below (for a default install). If you are running multiple wordpresses from the same db remember to check that you are deleting things from the correct instance first (your table may be called someting different, like myblog2_comments).

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'spam';

Before deleting the spam my database (well a dump of it anyway) took up 5.6MB, afterwards only 494KB.