The web world changes and we move on.

The advent of Twitter and other chatterbox facilitators has considerably reduced the number and quality of comments on tech sites and blogs.

There are some exceptions, like natural community sites — our Royal Anecdotes is a good example. But generally, comments are old hat.

So, because of the countervailing increase in spam comments, we have now turned them off across our network, with the exception of RA. Our new technology will instantly mark every comment as spam and delete it.

We may reverse this decision for individual posts, in which case you will see “Comments On” at the bottom of the post.

I’ve also decided to go full feed for RSS readers as they are now so user friendly most geeky readers don’t bother with individual sites any more.

Readers can, of course, still contact us at the email address shown in the footer.

I’m looking for anyone who can bring a little vorsprung durch technik to a “simple” WordPress problem.

We have a site with 23,000 spam comments in the moderation panel. WordPress only allows zapping 20 at a time, or a huge process of downloading the whole mess bucket, which invariably hangs the computer.

I’m seeking a quick way to zap the lot, maybe serverside using the MySQL panel. Has any bright spark got a handle on this?

Reward in Heaven.