Because of the 3 month long hiatus, I wasn’t able to do much with my blog except for approving comments. Spam comments have piled up and numbered at the thousands. No matter how much spam comments I have, I always make it a habit/practice to check the spam queue for valid comments. When I was done going through the list, I clicked on the Delete All button and waited for the spam comments to disappear. It was taking quite a while to finish and at first I thought it was taking long because of the large amount of spam comments I had but when I saw that the browser stopped loading and the spam comments were still there I knew something was wrong. Anyways, I tried doing it again and ended up repeating the process like three times to no avail.

The next thing I did was to do a Google search for “akismet can’t delete spam” and found this entry at the WordPress support forums. It turns out that the current version I was using, 2.1.7 had a bug – the Delete All option didn’t work, a bug that is specific to this version of Akismet. Previously, the only way to fix it was to revert to an earlier version, Akismet 2.1.6. Shortly after the bug was found, the folks over at Automattic released a newer version – Akismet 2.1.8 which fixed the bug. After reading this I immediately upgraded Akismet, went to my spam queue, clicked on the Delete All button and VIOLA!, all the spam comments disappeared.

In case you’re experiencing the same problem with “un-deleteable spam comments” or if you’re still running an older version of Akismet and plan to do an upgrade make sure you upgrade to the latest version which is Akismet 2.1.8 to fix/avoid this bug.