Mass Delete Comments In WordPress – Spam, Pending & Approved

How To Mass Delete Comments In WordPress – Spam, Pending & Approved

With WordPress Comment Spam increasingly becoming an issue you might find yourself with 100’s or even 1000’s of pending comments that you then need to delete. Unfortunately, the base WordPress install only lets you “bulk delete” pending comments page by page (i.e. 20 at a time). It is not difficult to imagine that this would be very time consuming to do.

Mass Delete Pending Comments In WordPress

Let us first read some basic facts about WordPress comments.

When comments come in for your WordPress blog, they can be one of these three categories.

1. Approved Comments:– WordPress has detected that these comments are real comments, and has immediately approved these comments.

2. Pending Comments:– These comments pass the spam filter, but either WordPress feels they they are some sorta “non human”, or it violates some of the rules you have laid in the blog discussion settings.

3. Spam Comments:– If you have the very handy Akismet in place, commented identified as spam will go direct to spam comments.

If your blog is popular to any extent, you can expect to receive a lot of spam comments. These are easy to clear. All you have to do is to click on Comments > Spamfrom your WordPress admin page, and you can clear them in one go, with the “Delete all Spam” button.

However, the issue comes when hundreds, or thousands of comments come in and they go into your moderation queue. This means they pass the spam filter.

Before (or after) deleting the pending comments you may want to consider configuring your WordPress install to help prevent spam comments.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to Delete Pending Comments in WordPress. In fact you have a few choices on how you go about doing it.

Deleting Pending Comments In WordPress Manually via phpMyAdmin

You can delete easily your WordPress Mass pending comments uing phpMyAdmin. To do so, you need to follow the below steps.

1. Login to your cPanel Account and select the phpMyAdmin in the Database section.

2. Select your database.

3. Click the SQL tab and run the following command.

DELETE from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved =  ‘0’

When you run the command, you will get a pop-up box asking for confirmation. Just click “OK”.

You can use this technique to carry out other similar tasks with just one very minor alteration to the command used.

Mass Delete All Approved Comments In WordPress via SQL

DELETE from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved =  ‘1’

Mass Delete All Spam Comments In WordPress via SQL

DELETE from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘spam’

Mass Delete All Trash Comments In WordPress via SQL

DELETE from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘trash’

Deleting Pending Comments In WordPress Manually via SSH

For those a little more technically minded and don’t mind logging in via SSH and using the command line it is very easy to Delete all your Pending Comments. Just follow these instructions.

1. Log in to your website server via SSH. Some hosts will disable this by default, but will allow access upon request.

2. Run the following command.

mysql -uDB_USERNAME -pDB_USER_PASSWORD -DYOUR_WORDPRESS_DB_NAME -e “DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘0’;”

If you used Softaculous, or another installer, to install WordPress, you would have received a confirmation after the install was complete with all the information you will need to run this command. Otherwise, you will hopefully have made a record of it when you installed it manually.

This command can be adapted with one minor change to carry out other comment related tasks.

Mass Delete all Approved Comments In WordPress via SSH

mysql -uDB_USERNAME -pDB_USER_PASSWORD -DYOUR_WORDPRESS_DB_NAME -e “DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘1’;”

Mass Delete All Spam Comments In WordPress via SSH

mysql -uDB_USERNAME -pDB_USER_PASSWORD -DYOUR_WORDPRESS_DB_NAME -e “DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘spam’;”

Mass Delete All Trash Comments In WordPress via SSH

mysql -uDB_USERNAME -pDB_USER_PASSWORD -DYOUR_WORDPRESS_DB_NAME -e “DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘trash’;”

Deleting Pending Comments In WordPress Using A Plugin

This is probably the least technical way to delete your pending comments in WordPress, and one of the easiest. Simply install the Delete Pending Comments Plugin. The easiest way to install the plugin is to go to the Plugins page in the Admin panel and then search for “Delete Pending Comments”. The plugin we recommend is the first one listed, although you will see several others that could be used.

Once installed, activate the plugin.

Under the Comments Menu in WordPress, you will see a sub-menu item to “Delete Pending Comments.” Once clicked you will be taken to the confirmation screen checking that you do indeed wish to delete all your pending comments. To confirm you will need to type some text in the box to confirm.

If successful, you will get a message saying “I deleted all pending comments!”.

I hope this article helped you a lot on deleting mass comments in WordPrss. As always feel free to comment in case you need help or have a question. Also share it to your friends.