Hi guys and thank you for help me. How I can completely remove 65000 (!) spam comments easily and protect me from future spam comments? thanks in advance

I second that, I only have 13,000 comments before I decided to enable reCaptcha (which I didn't want).

The worst part is, in the back end, I have switched the amount to show all comments, and now the page won't even load. This means that I cannot delete ANY comments!!! Is there a way around this?

Also, is there a way to use reCaptcha for only unregistered users?

This is an important issue! Why has there been no answer? It has been almost a full year. In over 300 days the K2 people have not read or considered that this could happen to many people.

How about an answer?

The simplest way to do this is with phpmyadmin/mysql. You should have your site backed up completely before you start.
I just did this on one of my sites with success. If there are comments you want to keep it will be more difficult, but is still able to be done. Hopefully the good comments are not mixed up with the bad ones, this would require more work.
The table you will want to "clean out" is jos_k2_comments. If you are not familiar with mysql pm me for more info.

Thank you, Worked like a charm. At first I received an error when trying to refresh the website but after a few an hour of trying to restore the database, it was working without the 'cleaned out' comments. I have changed the security setting to post comments only after moderation, but since the spam is coming at a rate of about one per 3-5 seconds, it won't be long before I'm forced to do it again. Thank you William.


William White said:The simplest way to do this is with phpmyadmin/mysql. You should have your site backed up completely before you start. I just did this on one of my sites with success. If there are comments you want to keep it will be more difficult, but is still able to be done. Hopefully the good comments are not mixed up with the bad ones, this would require more work.
The table you will want to "clean out" is jos_k2_comments. If you are not familiar with mysql pm me for more info.

I know this is an old post, but I want to thank William for his expertise, I had the exact same issue an I did just what you stated William, and went in and truncated the table, and all 55,600 comments were gone in a second.
I started deleting rows of 100 comments at the backend of joomla, and realized quickly it was going to take forever, I googled the problem and that query took me here, and I am completely jazzed that I was able to delete all comments in 0.0063 seconds.
Thanks William!
Oh, and I did back up my site as you suggested too, just in case. I am a novice web builder, and by doing this I am now introduced to the PHPmyadmin on my hosting account. Thanks!