I've been off my blog for just under two months now - and I just spent several hours junking over 8000 spam comments and closing some of my old comments to avoid this build-up of spam. Then I clicked on my Junk Comments folder - and there were a whopping 136000+. Wow!

My problem is this: in my Settings, I have selected the Auto-Delete Junk option, with a request to delete it after 5 days. Why isn't it auto-deleting??? I'm now seemingly forced to manually delete over 136000 junk comments, which will take EONS.

Can someone help? Is this a bug? Is there a quicker way to delete them? Is there any reason I shouldn't delete them??

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help!
Julie

Well, it's clear now that I was missing something! After a search on the internet, I found out that the Auto-Delete Junk Comments is triggered only when you click on thename of that specific blog within the main menu. I had been navigating directly where I wanted to go (Settings, Templates, Add New Entry, etc.), instead of accessing this main weblog page.

When I first tried this, there were so many comments that the system crashed, and reported an Internal Server Error. I believe this resulted in a core dump that, unfortunately, ate up some 400+ Megs of the disk space on my server. This caused all sorts of problems for me, but I got it figured out.

Ultimately, I had to go in and manually delete about 100,000 of the comments (I started at 5000 at a time, and had to work my way down to about 1000 at a time to not hang the script), THEN when trying the Auto-Delete function, it worked. But this was a HUGE pain. I'm considering upgrading to MT 3.3, but I'm not quite sure if they've changed the comment handling at all, so maybe not.