Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.
Last month I did a lot of work to make my sites load faster. One of the easiest ways to improve site performance is to remove unnecessary plugins, and one that I removed was Disqus.
Disqus is a great, sexy looking comment replacement for wordpress that is easy to install but I decided it wasn’t worth all the additional external javascript it was adding to my pages. My pageview:comments ratio is masssive, with probably 1-2 comments per thousand pageviews, so I couldn’t justify offering a good experience for 2 users and a worse experience for the other 998.
Another reason why I removed Disqus is because for visitors without javascript, all comments are displayed, even spammy trackbacks and pingbacks. This is really bad, as this is the version of pages that the googlebot sees.
After removing Disqus, I also realised what a poor job it had been doing with blocking spam so I had to spend some time removing these. Here are some of the steps I took.
Close All Pings/Trackbacks On Posts
In the wordpress dashboard there is an option to stop all pings and trackbacks. Unfortunately this only works on posts written after you choose this option. To apply it to all posts, go into your sql database and run:
This will close pings/trackbacks on all posts.
Mass Delete Pingbacks & Trackbacks
Some may disagree, but I see no value to displaying pingbacks and trackbacks on a post. Most of these are spam anyway, so to delete all pingbacks and trackbacks:
to delete all pingbacks, and:
to delete all trackbacks.
The other steps I’m taking, unfortunately I haven’t found an easy way to fix. Re-importing my comments back to WP has left me with lots of duplicates, which I’m having to delete manually..it’s a long term project…
The other problem is all the spam that Disqus missed. What I had to do here, was use the updated word block list that akismet uses and search and delete offending comments. Doing this also highlighted additional words to add to the filters, so I think my site is pretty much spam free now.
To stop any future spam, I’ve also set WP to make pending any comment containing a link.
SQL Commands To Help Manage WordPress Comments And Spam is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for more articles.
