Spam in bulk? No problem!

Only you can prevent comment pollution.

photo: bicanski

Comment spam makes your blog feel unfriendly and neglected.

Here's how to wrangle the garbage—if you get a lot of it.

An earlier post explains how to mark an individual comment as spam, and details the different options (Spam, Publish, Delete).

But what if you get a lot? Which you might: spammers use automated systems to write thousands of comments an hour.

Bulk (batch) management

You can handling many comments as a group, such as the 50 spam comments I recently got over the course of a few hours.

On the Comments page of your dashboard, click the Manage link at upper right to enter this bulk-management mode.

This activates a toolbar above the list of comments.

Selecting any of the comments activates the controls. These include the same actions available in single-comment mode (spam, publish delete).

There is also one new, and unintuitive, option.

In the below image, I've clicked on the "avatar" that represents the spam commenter, selecting the comment and activating the controls.

There's one comment selected (red check, lower left) so the controls are no longer greyed out.

At top right, a checkbox lets you select all the comments that have loaded on the page, or unselect them all. (The "dash in a checkbox" shown in the above screen shot just means "some, but not all" of the 100 comments on the page are selected.)

The key word here is all. If you only want the actions you will take to apply to some of the comments, select them individually instead.

The comments page typically loads the most recent 100 comments. If you scroll to the end, you can increase that in hundred-comment increments.

Then you can select all, if you like, to operate on them at once: 200, 300, 1,000. However, things get pretty slow after a few hundred, so I don't recommend letting things get too large.

Next to the checkbox is information about how many you have selected.

(And yes, I do have thousands of comments on this blog. I'm a popular fellow! But about 3k of them are just spam comments I've never gotten around to deleting.)

After that come the familiar controls to publish (check mark) or delete:

 An exclamation point in an octagon, to mark as spam

 A trash can, to delete irreversibly

 A check mark, to publish.

These are the same controls available when operating on a single comment, outside of batch mode.

There's also another control, an "x" in an octagon. It will "remove contents" of comments. Be careful with this, because (like regular delete) it is not reversible.

What does it mean to remove the contents of a comment, versus deleting the comment?

Remove contents

Remove contents only will leave behind evidence that a comment was there.

In place of the former comment will be the words "this comment was deleted by a blog administrator."

The action also deletes the comment from your dashboard. You won't be able to find it there again.

The use case for this, maybe, is if you want to delete a comment but not the direct replies to it. That could happen if you have threaded comments.

If you moderate comments to begin with, you probably wouldn't publish an objectionable comment in the first place, but I guess it happens. 

However, oddly enough, applying this option to an unpublished comment will publish it! or rather, the content-free note that you deleted something.

I consider this to be a bug. You probably would not want to do this on purpose to an unpublished comment. What would be the point?

Yet it is easy to do accidentally, in batch mode.

Note that you can also delete contents of comments from within the live blog post, where each comment has a "delete" option.

If you click that, you'll have to chose what kind of deletion: complete, or just "contents" with the same message.

(If a commenter uses their Google account to leave a comment, they too can delete contents, leaving a slightly different note behind.)

Why is this available in batch mode at all?

For most situations, a clean deletion is better for your readers, who can be spared puzzling out exactly what happened.

Click to apply

Click any of the actions buttons to set the status of the selected comments. On mobile, the results are instantaneous.

In desktop mode, you'll get a confirmation window, your last chance to make sure you did not chose the wrong action by accident. (Those buttons are very close together!)

Deleting also deletes any replies.

Confirm to make it so.

Or, to cancel the operation and exit the "manage" mode, click Cancel at left.

If you've filtered by Published, the option to publish will not be present. "Mark as spam" is similarly not an option if you've filtered by Spam.

Stay on top of spam

Spam comments are a bad look. They will discourage your readers if you let them.

If the comments include links to malware sites, Google might delete your blog.

Moderate comments or enable the captcha, mark spam, and keep your blog clean and welcoming.

singleton spam • why it's bad