Using Drush to Mass Delete Comments

Like many kind, good-natured geeks, I (yes, I was talking about me) host a number of small sites for friends. Many of those sites run Drupal and several don’t get a lot of attention. That is, until spammers find their way around Mollom. I’ve seen this happen a few times, but most recently on a Drupal 7 site. In this particular case, the spam comments had been trickling in over a few weeks undetected. Following a burst of recent activity (enough to notice via monitoring), I checked in to find > 60,000 spam comments.

If this has ever happened to you: you’re not alone. At this number of comments, using Drupal’s interface (50 comments at a time) isn’t really usable. Also, these things tend to happen in bursts - so chances are good there’s a block of comments that are all spam (i.e. there haven’t been any legitimate comments that you want to save since it started). So, I whipped up a small script here:

<?php $first_comment = 38898; $num_delete = 50; do { $cids = db_select('comment', 'c') ->fields('c', array('cid')) ->condition('cid', $first_comment, '>=') ->range(0, 50) ->execute() ->fetchCol(); print "deleting ". count($cids). " comments...\n"; comment_delete_multiple($cids); } while (count($cids) == $num_delete);

Here’s how to use it:

Place the code in a file (say, comment-rm.php) in your Drupal directory.
Find the cid of the first spam comment (exercise left to the reader) and set $first_comment to that value.
Run drush scr comment-rm.php and go grab a coffee.

Hope that helps someone, but at least now I can find it again next time.

Beware: This deletes comments forever, be careful.