The delete in "Update options" is deleting ALL comments in the database.

Twice I have had all the comments in the database deleted when using the "Update Options" box to delete spam on the /admin/comment/list/spam page. Once on Doc Searls' IT Garage site and once on Linux Journal's site. Both are running version 4.6.3.

Both times when this happened I had deleted several pages, one page at a time by checking every box on the page and then clicking on the "Update Comments" button with "delete selected comments" in the drop down box.

There were no symptoms to indicate that anything was wrong while I was deleting or after I finished deleting. I noticed the problem when I logged in later and saw the log page was full of "comment deleted" statements.

Since I do not see anyone else complaining about this on the forums it might be something specific to my computer or to the site. Since Doc's is on a different server than Linux Journal and one is phptemplate and the other is xtemplate I don't think it has anything to do with the sites.... That leaves my system or a bug in the software....?

My OS is Suse 9.0 and was using Opera 8.5 both times this problem occured. This version of Opera seems to have a few bugs so it could be causing the problem. I would like to help you test this but it is such a big problem on a heavily used site like ours, to have to rebuild the database, that my solution is going to be to use phpmyadmin to delete the spam instead of your Update Options box... :-)

The only other odd thing that I noticed was that in the type collum in the logs, when I was deleting the spam, it would alternate like this:

spam
content
spam
content
spam
content

Even though all of the deletions were spam.

At the point that it ran away, and started deleting everything, it switched to "content" and stayed that way until the database was empty. There was one deletion statement right between where the spam stopped and the "good" comments started being deleted that was unusual also:

Type content
Date Sunday, October 16, 2005 - 13:15
User Keith Daniels
Location /admin/comment/list/spam
Message Comment: deleted .
Severity notice
Hostname 201.200.65.82

Notice that under Message it did not list "what" message it deleted. I had never noticed that happening before.

If you have any questions you can email me at keith@ssc.com and I will be glad to answer any questions if I can.

Keith Daniels