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Update 2006-12-03: OK, got all the gunk scraped off the blog. Turns out that deleting 400 comments at a time was about as much as my system could handle; much more than that, and it would return an error.

For Movable Type 3.2 users, be aware that there is a “known issue” regarding the auto-deletion of junk email –it only happens when you visit the main admin page for that blog. I hadn’t been doing that lately, because that page hadn’t been loading properly, presumably because of all the spam gunking up the system! Vicious circle, anyone? Anyway, should be back to normal. Feel free to celebrate by leaving a comment.

So I hadn’t been paying too much attention to how much spam we were getting on these blogs on the Colorado College server, other than noticing that I had been getting more emails than usual about IPs being banned for too many comments (i.e., for big fat spam attacks).

Then when I went to list all the junk comments to delete them, the system choked. When I checked earlier today, I saw that I had about eighteen thousand undeleted junk comments. Checking again just now, I see that I have twenty seven thousand.

So, even thought it may not look like it, I have comments turned off on this blog and all the other ones on this Movable Type installation while I figure out a better strategy for deleting them than doing it one screen of 125 at a time. Wish me luck. I hope to be back to normal soon.