WordPress – How to Mark Comments as Spam in Bulk

This is a quick guide to show you how to mark thousands of WordPress comments as spam in bulk.

Video Guide

Text Guide

Sometimes we don’t have time to check every comment on our website; but there’s a mark that distinguished 99% of spamming comments: spam comments contain links.

Therefore, in this tutorial, we’ll search for all the comments that include http or https links in the content, and we’ll mark them as spam in bulk.

Warning – Take into account that you could be marking as spam some comments containing internal links. But don’t worry because we have a great solution.

We’ll use the WP Sheet Editor – Comments and Reviews plugin. It allows you to view and manage all your WordPress comments and WooCommerce reviews using an intuitive spreadsheet inside WordPress. The plugin contains advanced search and bulk edit tools that help you increase your productivity. It also contains export/import tools that allow you to migrate comments from one site to another without losing the relationship between the comments and the posts.

Once you install and activate the plugin, follow these simple steps to find all comments containg http or https links and mark them as spam.

1- Open the comments and reviews spreadsheet

You may need to set up the spreadsheet, but here’s a quick guide.

To open the comments and reviews spreadsheet, go to WP Sheet Editor > Edit Comments in wp-admin.

You’ll see all your comments and reviews displayed on the spreadsheet.

2- Search for all the comments containing links

Now you need to find all comments containing links in their content.

For this, we’ll use the Search tool, which is on the plugin’s toolbar.

Once you open the search tool, select the following values to find all comments containing https or http links:

• Comment type: Comment
• Tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and select these values:
• Field: Content
• Operator: Contains
• Value: Here you can enter “http” or “https”
• Optional field – NOT contains this keyword: You can use this field to enter your website’s address to exclude all comments containing internal links.
• Hit Run Search.

Once you hit the Run search button, you’ll see all the comments containing https or http links in the content.

3- Mark all the filtered comments as spam

Now you need to open the Bulk Edit tool, which allows you to edit any field for all the filtered comments. In this case, it will allow you to bulk mark all the filtered comments as spam.

Once you’re in the Bulk Edit tool, select the following values to mark all the comments as spam:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
• What field do you want to edit: Status
• Select type of edit: Set value
• Replace existing value with this value: Spam
• Hit Execute Now.

After applying this bulk edit, you will see that all products have a new status: they have been marked as “Spam”.

Avoid having to check comments or reviews one by one. You can easily find all comments that contain links and mark them as spam in bulk. And the best thing is that when these links are links to your own site, you won’t mark them as spam because you can easily exclude all comments including your site’s link.