Friday morning I got a notice from my server that one of my hosted websites had exceeded its space quota. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I’m the only one changing that site, and I haven’t touched it in a few days. What’s going on?” It just didn’t feel right. It was Friday, but it was acting more like a Monday.

Upon further investigation, I found that I was NOT the only one changing things. Seems that the comment count on the photo gallery was over 73,000! Ugh. And all of them are trash. They’re scums that use automated systems to advertise their websites. You know the sites, the same ones you get all the spam about. Ugh.

So first thing I did was check the settings on the gallery. I changed it so that you have to prove you’re human in order to leave a comment. You know, read the funky letters or numbers and type them in - aka Captcha. I did this for all sites that use this gallery.

Still curious. How do 73,000 comments in a database increase the disk space used by the website? Easy. They apparently create files to go along with the comments.

So how to clean it up? I don’t want all those comments out there, and they’re taking up space. Checking the gallery’s website, I find that someone, bless their heart, has created a script to clean up all the comments. It only deletes 500 at a time, so I’ve got a long way to go. But at least I’m cleaning it up.

I’m always into counting and numbering things. So, among 4 websites galleries, I had a total of 106,181 comments! And, after cleaning up the mess, I had over 700MB more space on the server. Perhaps I’ll re-look at other photo gallery programs and see if there’s one that doesn’t take up so much space or that makes it easier to turn off comments. The one I’m using is, after all Open Source, and free - so I guess it proves once again - “You get what you pay for.”

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