While I'm certain that Community Server has the ability to easily delete comments en mass, this blog still uses Scott Watermasysk's close to originally-released version of .Text (gasp!). I've been meaning to upgrade, I promise, but with the assorted customizations I've done and the time needed to make the transition, it's hard to justify taking the time to fix something that's really not broken.
My one complaint, however, has been comment spam. This blog is blasted with dozens of comment spam messages on a daily basis. Most of these are filtered out proactively with some machine-level tests (essentially looking for keywords that indicate spamminess), which I've blogged about before. In fact, to date the technique I use to stop comment spam has quashed 13,046 messages from making their way to the ScottOnWriting.NET blog.
Regardless, comment spam still creeps in and deleting it through the .Text admin page is a pain. You see a list of the comments, each with a Delete button. Cicking Delete takes you to a screen that says, “Are you sure you want to delete this?” Hitting Confirm takes you back to the main page with the comment deleted. This is OK when there are one or two comment spams to delete, but a carpal tunnel-inducing nuissance when you are blasted with, say, 15 spam messages in a two minute period. Ideally I would be able to check a number of checkboxes and click a “Delete Selected” button.
To further put off the upgrade to Community Server and to get some good ol' ASP.NET 2.0 practice, I decided to create a simple ASP.NET 2.0 website locally that would provide such an interface. And I was able to create it in under 5 minutes with having to write less than 10 lines of code. 2.0 rocks.
Anyway, the code is available for download here. It's just a single page, Default.aspx, which lists the 50 most recent comments in a GridView. Each GridView row has a CheckBox. At the bottom there's a “Delete Selected Comments” Button that, when clicked, iterates through each GridView row and, if selected, programmatically invokes the SqlDataSource control's Delete() method (which is wired up to the blog_DeletePost sproc). (The exact sprocs/queries used here may differ for more modern versions of .Text or Community Server.)
For those three people still using .Text who haven't upgraded to Community Server, enjoy!