Spam comments at this blog outnumbers real comments a few hundred to one, and I should think other bloggers have the same experience; for sites that attract a large number of real comments, the spammers sadly lob their link rubbish in the same direction a great deal more. Now, my spam detection system is pretty good, but as with all systems, it’s not foolproof. I therefore like to scan-read my spam queue, prior to deletion, to see if any real comments have been incorrectly categorised. Unfortunately, some spam items are extremely lengthy, which makes scrolling down the list a time-consuming business.

What’d be great here is a WP plugin that creates a grid of spam items, featuring the first 15 or so words of each (more than enough to determine its spam status). This would allow an AJAX paginated display containing a good 80-100 items inside a single monitor screen, which in turn would permit the user to click through several pages of likely spams without having to vertically scroll. Once the user is happy all spams have been correctly categorised, they can hit WordPress’s “Empty Spam” button, and the items will be vamoosed away quickly.

For miscategorisations, each grid item could have an AJAX ‘not spam’ button to remove it from the grid, and to quietly publish it in the background.