The site was down over Christmas so I could run a deep-cleaning of the site database – there were tens of thousands of spam comments in the database, and I wanted to have a clean site for the New Year. Thankfully, the database is working fine, several thousand annoying ads for various poker sites have been sent to the bit bucket, and all is well…
I also updated the site to the latest version of WordPress – which is really, really nice…
UPDATE: For the technically inclined, the old size of the MySQL database for this site was nearly 97MB – 60MB+ of which was in the comments table. There were nearly 70,000 spam comments still in the database compared to about 11,500 legitimate comments. So, obviously, there was a lot of junk data taking up space. Those entries were deleted from the table and the table was reoptimized – I also deleted some old unnecessary tables from previous spam control systems, bringing the database down to 26.5MB – an incredible difference in size.
For spam control, I’m currently using the Askimet distributed spam-killing system which should do an excellent job of keeping the poker/drug/pr0n spamming morons off my comment table without me having to constantly tweak spam control systems.
It doesn’t look like any legitimate comments were lost – but if you happen to see any, let me know and I can try restoring them from a database backup I made. (Yes, I’m finally getting wise to the making sure that everything is backed up as frequently as possible…)
I ran akismet for a while, however, it had too many false positives. I lost about 5 or 6 valid trackbacks to my site in about a week. I went back to spamkarma 2.0 with the wp2.0 plugin, and haven’t had any false positives or negatives in weeks.