Q&A Friday #82: Why Are The Old Comment Threads Wiped Out

by John Hawkins | January 11, 2008 7:50 am

Question: “Why are all the old threads wiped out?” — mightysamurai

Answer: All the old comment threads on Right Wing News are eventually automatically deleted for a variety of reasons.

One of the most important is that before RWN had its back-end updated, spam bots would tend to target to old threads (with the idea being that they could improve their Google rank by having it show up on RWN). It was not unusual for me to have to delete hundreds of those spam messages every day.

Also, weirdly, occasionally I would come across people posting really offensive messages in the older threads. In the new threads, comments of that sort tend to be seen and deleted, but they could get by with sticking it in the older ones.

Additionally, there are a heck of a lot of comments made on RWN every week-day and pruning the old ones helps keep the size of the MySQL database from getting too huge.

Since few people are interested in looking at the old comment threads anyway, it generally doesn’t cause too much of a problem to delete them.