Introduction

You have enabled commenting in your Plone Site. Now you wake up and see that during the night some spammer has added 1337 comments in your site. What do you do now? Sure, you first shoot him and then you integrate some captcha solution, but you still have those 1337 comments. You do not want to click 1337 times on a delete button. Have no fear: zest.commentcleanup will rescue you! Or at least it will help you get rid of those spam comments faster.

How does it work?

Just add zest.commentcleanup to the eggs parameter of the instance section of your buildout.cfg. On Plone 3.2 or earlier add it to the zcml parameter as well.

The package simply works by registering some browser views. Start your instance, go to the root of your site and add /@@cleanup-comments-overview to the url. This will give you an overview of which items in your site have comments. It is sorted so the item with the most comments is at the top.

Note that the overview works on other contexts as well, for example on a folder.

In the overview click on the manage link of an item with comments. This takes you to the cleanup-comments-details page of that item. This lists all comments, ordered by creation date. From there you can delete single items.

But the biggest thing you can do there is: select a comment and delete this and all following comments. The idea is that the first three comments may be valid comments, then there are a gazillion spam comments, and very likely no actual human has added a valid comment somewhere in that spam flood anymore. So you keep the first few comments and delete the rest without having to buy a new mouse because you have clicked too much.

From the overview page you can also go to the @@cleanup-comments-list page. Here you see the latest comments, which you can remove one at a time. This is handier when you have done the big cleanup already and only need to check the new comments of the last few days.

All the used views are only available if you have the Manage portal permission.

Requirements

This has been tested on Plone 3.3.5 with the standard comments. It might or might not work with packages like quintagroup.plonecomments or plone.app.discussion. It probably works on Plone 2.5 and 4 as well, but I have not checked. Hey, it might even work in a default CMF site.