Comments Back On

I just went through 4,349 weblog comments here at Notio World Headquarters, and approximately 4,100 of them were junk. Then, after I hit the delete button, the cgi process at pair.com timed-out, crashing half-way through. So there are 2,166 left to go through again. Joy.
So I’ve temporarily turned off comments until I can figure out how to gain finer control over them. I did this in a brute-force way, so it might have broken something along the way. We’ll see. In any case, I hope to fix this soon.
Update #1: Well, on the second try it crashed again, but now there are only 1,011 comments left. Once again, with feeling….
Update #2: I appear to have deleted the ~4,100 published spam comments. Then, I went to the “junk” comments, which are unpublished, and there are 5,438 of those! All this since November. Let’s see how many tries this takes…. It’s a bit easier since I’m not scanning these for valid comments, I’m just nuking them all.
Update #3: It took three tries. Comments are back on. I’ve set it to be very aggressive and automatically junk suspicious comments. For instance, junk it if there are more than three links in a comment, for starters. Let’s see how it goes.
Update #4: While I was hacking, I switched from the file-based Berkeley DB to the modern MySQL database. That seems to have gone okay, but it’s a major back-end change. Crossing fingers!