Comment spammers found a hole in the gallery software I use and managed to pollute it with about 6000+ viagra/nekkid people/hair tonic ads. I made a valiant effort to cleanse this stuff manually but man, 6000 something is just too many to deal with when you have to click delete one by one and wait for the page to reload, so ultimately I took the ‘nuke the site from orbit’ option and ran a script to delete all comments. It’s a shame, there were some classics in there, including various ones about our annual camping trips, and the one from the angry woman who later died. I’ll work to replace the commenting system with something less susceptible to spammers, but for now, sorry – it’s all gone.
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Dave's Place/Metamusing 
FYI: The next Gallery version (G2.3) will have improved anti-spam / mass deletion features (akismet spam checks, AJAX delete for comments).
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Dave, sorry to hear it. I’ve found that the captcha approach to protecting Gallery from comment spam isn’t working at all. I’ve been tinkering with a variety of different captchas for my personal Gallery and none of them work.. my Gallery is getting the spam beatdown. As a result, I’ve been working on adding support for Akismet to the comment module and will be submitting that to Gallery 2.3 shortly. In my testing, I’ve found that it eliminates just under 99% of the comment spam that I’ve been seeing. I’ve also Ajaxified the UI so that it’s far, far easier to delete (or mark as spam) the stray comments that make it through. Stay tuned!
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Shit, where will I find my V1 ag7a now?
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Ha! Got a laugh out of that one. Sorry, you’re on your own. I suggest signing up for a hotmail account.
😉
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Hey there,
Askimet support would be fantastic – it’s what I use to protect wordpress and it works great. Thanks much for the awesome software, I’m a longtime gallery user and fan.
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