For some reason I can't entirely work out, some porn-merchant has decided to place comments on 90 or so of my pages.

They are all the same, perfectly innocuous on the face of it ("Thanks for your site"), but annoying.

Presumably they were supposed to generate hits for the porno site, but for some reason the pornographer didn't include his URL with the comment, so that didn't work. (It came through the email alert, though, so I know who the perpetrator is and have IP-banned him.)

Anyway, there doesn't appear to be any mechanism in MT for listing and deleting a whole series of comments (unlike entries). So I downloaded the archive folder via ftp, searched and replaced them using BBEdit, and put them back 'clean'.

Unfortunately, when I rebuild the site, they all come back. Can anyone explain what's going on, and help me fix it?

You're going to need to find the comments from within MT and remove them that way. As long as they're in your database, rebuilds will put them back on the pages of your site.

One thing you could do to locate all the comments is generate a listing with a new Index Template:



Save the template and rebuild. Then view that page. You'll see a list of all the comments on your blog, with an edit link that you can click to go straight to the comment in the MT interface (make sure you're already logged in to MT) and delete it.

When you've deleted them all, rebuild your entire site.

If you're using MySQL, you may be able to edit the database directly to remove the comments (never done it myself, so I'm not sure of any negative impact that would have).

Thanks girlie,

I rather feared that was what I was going to have to do. Your comment-editing template looks like a good solution (safer than delving into mySQL, certainly). But it would be nice if there was some way of batch-editing comments in standard MT, wouldn't it? I don't imagine I'm the first person this has happened to...

Some hours later...

There turned out to be 177 unwanted comments for me to remove, one at a time.

Your template helped a lot, but there is still a real need for something in MT that lets you batch edit or delete malicious comments (especially those from a single IP) with a couple of clicks.

It seems slightly odd that MT provides tools for power-editing your own entries, which presumably you can control in the first place, but nothing to help you deal with entries randomly submitted by the nutcases and sociopaths who inhabit the dingier corners of the web.

One for the 'suggest new features' section, perhaps...

Power Editing for Comments is already on the Requested Features List.