Bulk deleting “trash” comments with phpmyadmin

Hello!

Wordpress latest stable here, 6.1.1, on a Debian Buster server.

A blog I tend to has over 10k comments in the trash folder. I suspect it’s a combination of a wave of spam comments, and an option in the antispam to not directly delete spam comments, but trash them.

I can’t delete them properly in the wordpress admin. If I go into Admin > Comments > Trash > “Empty trash” button, because of the limits on php execution time, a 500 internal error shows up (nothing serious, it’s just the server interrupting the job, the blog works just fine), and only around 100 comments have been deleted, max.

I want to bulk delete the “Trash” comments with phpmyadmin, I figure an SQL command will do the job better.

However, I cannot find RECENT documentation on the topic. At best, I find pages from 2018 like this one: https://www.crybit.com/managing-comments-wordpress/

Maybe it is still valid, but maybe wordpress has changed so much that the advice they give has become obsolete, and I would risk to cause problems.

May I humbly ask if the following command would still do the job, without risking to produce problems?

delete * from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved='trash';

Here’s how one of those comments I wish to delete looks like in wp_comments : https://imgur.com/a/Er4WBK9 (phpmyadmin screenshot)
I *think* that command would still work, there’s indeed the “comment_approved” column with the “trahs” value, but I am not 100% positive I’m not missing something, I’m waaaay out of my field.

Thanks a lot if someone can give that confirmation! And have a nice day 🙂

• This topic was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Sabinooo.
• This topic was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Sabinooo.