22,000 spam messages blocked!

Yesterday I was looking through my website’s cpanel when I noticed that my mySQL database was taking 40+ MB of space. This was way too much for a my little old blog so I fired up phpmyadmin to take a closer look. It turned out that the serendipity spam block table was occupying almost all the space with over 22,000 rows in it!

A quick search at the s9y forums revealed that this was a known problem. The solution, according to developer Garvin, was to use phpmyadmin’s empty option to clear the table.

/uploads/empty_table.png
Clearing the spam block table

The table belongs to the serendipity spam block plugin which, like similar plugins for other blog systems, can really cause your database to balloon in size. To prevent this from happening in the future it is worthwile turning off rejected comments logging. You can do that in the administration suite > comments > configure anti-spam measures > choose logging method.

Now I don’t know why my blog attracts so much spam but I think the spamblock plugin is truly awesome! Its got an excellent blend of features to rule out both spam bots and trolls. What’s more it is included in the default s9y distribution. In my case it has saved my blog from over 22,000 spam comments and trackbacks in just a year of operation.

4 thoughts on “22,000 spam messages blocked!

  1. good to know i am not alone.getting an avg of 100 spam messages a day and no way to get rid of them except hit the delete spam button continuosly

    • Yeah spam is a major problem. Fortunately I never see my spam. It gets blocked automatically. I just have to clear my spam block table once a year as I have mentioned in the post above.

  2. I simply approve comments on my blog. I started this after some person from India started spamming my blog incessantly.

    It has helped quite a bit.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *