Database Cleanup

Kabitzin on November 21, 2006 · in Site News

Every so often I like to go through the database and clean up. I’m sure most people won’t care, but here’s the list of changes:

• Fixed Writer Comments: At one point, there was some quirk in Sea Slugs! where the commenter’s email and URL were stripped before being written to the database. This was highly frustrating, but eventually fixed itself in an upgrade. I finally sat down to convert table entries to populate with the correct values. I’m not an SQL whiz, so my methods may have been rather primitive, but it beat the heck out of fixing every comment individually. The comment formatting for authors should now work correctly, and I found some very interesting things…
  • Kungfucius apparently never signs in for commenting! Amazing, I know. However, he is remarkably consistent with his entries, and so it was very easy to fix all his comment tables.
  • I have a lot of comments, but I stay logged in all the time. Because of this, all my incorrect entries were in the same time period. As I had made several half-assed attempts to fix the problem manually, I had to write up 3 different SQL queries to fix all my comments, but it was not too difficult.
  • Now Ender… OK, not only did Ender not sign in to leave comments before (owing to the login-cookie problem in the early days), but he more often then not leaves a fake email address. Not only that, but he uses a variety of fake email addresses from the ever popular a@a.com to a@s.com. To compound the problem even further, he sometimes misspells the fake email addresses, leaving such gems as a@s,com. These comment entries took a very long time to fix…
• Deleted Short-stat: I used it from time to time to track hits and such, since I’m often too lazy to sign on to Google’s stats or the stats programs available in the CPanel. However, on checking the database, I found that this plugin was insanely bloated, and the tables associated with the plugin took up 50x as much space as the rest of the blog. I dumped the plugin and dropped the tables.
• Issues with Spam Karma: Again, because of my laziness, sometimes I just flag spam comments as “Spam” directly in the Edit Comments section instead of flagging it with Spam Karma 2. However, apparently this does not factor into Spam Karma’s rankings. So if an old comment is flagged as Spam and not “Manually Spanked”, Spam Karma 2 thinks that the comment is an old and respectable comment. Because of this, I deleted all Spam-flagged comments and turned off Granularity Checks.
• Re-enabled Trackbacks: I go back and forth on this every few months. We’ll see if the spam TB’s get caught this time; if not, they’ll be turned off again.