Tag Archives: delete

Fighting spammers: Removing Website URL Field from Comment Form

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I’m tired of receiving massive amount of spam comments on my blog (1280 spam comments for about a month) and doing:

DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = 0

Beside using SI Captcha Anti-Spam which does pretty good job in keeping some of the automated spam bots at bay, I noticed some trend in the spam comments flooding my posts, they are all full of SEO keywords and they are heavy abusing the Website field in the comment form.

Here is a small “plugin” which will remove (unset) the URL field in the comments form:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Remove Website field from comments.
*/
function custom_comment_fields( $fields ){
  if(isset($fields['url']))
    unset($fields['url']);
  return $fields;
}
 
add_filter( 'comment_form_default_fields', 'custom_comment_fields' );

Create a file in /wp-content/plugins/ with the code a bough. Go to the ‘Plugins’ section of the admin panel and activate the newly created plugin named “Remove Website field from comments”.

Yey, no more “Website” field in the “Leave a Reply” section 🙂

Truncating MySQL tables with foreign key constrains

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One cannot TRUNCATE, MySQL table that has FK constraints applied on it. TRUNCATE is not the same as DELETE. There are 2 possible workarounds for the problem. The good (which does not risk damage to data integrity) and the bad.

Option 1:

  1. Remove constraints.
  2. Perform TRUNCATE.
  3. Delete manually the rows that now have references to nowhere.
  4. Create constraints.

Option 2: Aka the BAD variant. Very handy during development.

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;
 
TRUNCATE table1;
TRUNCATE table2;
 
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;

Disabling foreign key checks may lead to a damage to the data integrity, for ex. leaving your tables with rows that do not adhere to the FOREIGN KEY constraints.