This summer, a powerful gesture covered all commercial signage on a Viennese shopping street with bright yellow blocks.

Public art can only engage directly with commercial space, as long as its ephemeral, right? But, two weeks provides lasting images of a work about the coordination of a large group of people who would not have covered their signs on their own. And a work of cooperation is a different work indeed. Anyone could produce this piece in almost any commercial setting because the site isn’t babied, it’s used. If it has to be ephemeral then why at least can’t it be traveling?

The Migration Patterns of Words

Migrating laura’s writing and pictures from the proprietary Movable Type platform to the free Wordpress platform brought all of the unwanted advertising which had plagued our original design. There was no method within Movable Type for blocking these software programs from repeatedly posting ad links. The software worked to increase the poster’s google rank by submitting advertising as comments. The poster knows that google’s rank increases as the number of sites that link to the poster’s products increases. These comments help someone sell more.

So after splitting the 90 meg Movable Type text export (82 megs of comments) into 5 different text files and importing each into Wordpress as “import.txt,” I am ready to delete them. All something over 80,000 of ‘em. Wordpress presents a ‘Mass Delete Mode’ for comments that allows you to initially delete 20 at a time. So I find the code and change 20 to a 100. This helps for a while, but feels crude. Down to 78,000…only a one-time marathon…must keep going. Can’t you just delete all the comments about texas holdem and penis enlargement? There are patterns here after all, it is only software. 76,915 left.

Getting into Specifics

Different day, I dig into the webhost’s install of phpMyAdmin and find the wp_comments table. I choose phpMyAdmin’s SQL menu item to receive an area to type in and a “go” button. I delete the statement in the text box and type:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_content LIKE '%holdem%'

Deletes 21,035 comments that contain the word holdem in the comment.

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_author_email LIKE '%gigiduru@yahoo.com%'

Deletes 8,546 comments that have gigiduru@yahoo.com as the comment poster’s email.

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_author = '%penis enlargement%'

Deletes 3,869 comments that have penis enlargement some where in the comment poster’s name.

I use the Mass Delete Mode in Wordpress as a monitor for my progress, refreshing it after each SQL command that I type and press ‘go’ on. I keep a list as the comments start shedding like Brian’s dog:

• ‘%penis enlargement%’ 2510 as content
• ‘%Phentermine%’ 2937 as content

Conclusion

In two hours I am down to 12,986. Although still repetitive, it’s an appropriate approach to selecting deletable comments because it adapts easily to the behaviour of the comment-posting software. Effective ad filtering within website comments requires this ability to mass-delete if they match a given word. Mass-delete helps writers quickly recover from large floods of unwanted advertising, including those Movable Type refugees that may wash up on Wordpress’ shore. Build it in.

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Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 at 3:30 pm

topic: art, tech