Make Discussion Settings > Comment Blacklist retroactive

[thomas.galvin]

I've found that I often receive many spam comments at the same time, all with very similar content. If the spam filters don't catch them, I manually mark them all as spam, and then try to add the common, "duh, yes, this is obviously spam" text to the Discussion Settings > Comment Blacklist.

For example, if I received the following comments:

• Buy cheap toner cartridges!

• We have toner cartridges cheap!

• You won't believe the prices on these toner cartridges!

• TSA-fooling toner cartridges real cheap!

• etc etc, a few dozen more times

I would manually mark them all as spam, then add "toner cartridges" to the blacklist, to stop these comments in the future. I also do the same with IP addresses that have flooded me with spam.

It would be nice if there was a way to make the blacklist retroactive, so that it would go through all of my existing comments and automatically spam the ones containing the offending text.

I realize that this is basically what a bayesian filter is supposed to do, but I have found that I am often able to identify patterns that the filters miss.

[nacin]

Akismet has a re-check button. I wonder if it includes the blacklist?

[nacin]

This looks like something that should be implemented in a plugin. Let's see that first before considering it for core.

[duck_]

Replying to nacin:

Akismet has a re-check button. I wonder if it includes the blacklist?

I think it only rechecks unapproved comments and then just uses the akismet API.