I’ve got the comment-spam filters tweaked by now so that not a lot gets through, but I still get it all on the back end, with spam filling up the comments, waiting to be “moderated.” (Comments here go straight to being published by default, unless they get flagged as potential comment spam). I also have an email sent to me for every comment so that I can see activity on the blog, so when I get a whole package of comments coming in rapidly during one of about four peak times of day when they seem to occur, I can check the blog to make sure none slip through, and then go and “moderate” them into oblivion at my er, leisure. Stupid spammers, wasting my time and bandwidth.
So I love WordPress, and recommend it highly as a blogging engine… except for one thing which I hate. The “mass edit” mode of the comments editing has no “undelete” feature. You see where this is going already, don’t you? It does have a handy “invert selection” function so you can check the 5 comments you want to keep, hit the invert link, and then hit the delete button to kill the rest. Unfortunately, I just finished deleting comments; fortunately only five. This happened once before and I lost only one, but I didn’t want to lose what others have taken the trouble to write (we bloggers appreciate those that show us the love through commenting). Sadly, WordPress not having an undelete means just that, and I didn’t really want to have to root through the database to see if they really, really meant it…. so I just finished copying and pasting the last five comments from the emails I receive into WordPress, then editing the poster name (I get to edit whatever I want about posts and comments, another nice WordPress feature) so it’d match the original. What doesn’t match is the date/time posted and the comment number (nor the IP address logged on the back end, of course, but you don’t see that). So to anyone who actually notices this, my apologies, now you know what happened.
But on the other hand, why wouldn’t WordPress omit an undelete function? It’s a fairly simple thing, rather than purging it from the database when the delete button is pressed, it could just be flagged as deleted in the database, and WordPress would then just ignore anything flagged as deleted. A separate maintenance function could allow display, search, or retrieval (“re-flagging”) of deleted items, as well as allow actually purging them from the database. A lot of applications are built that way… but if anyone knows of a WordPress plugin that does this, let me know.
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