This night I was The Moderator. The reason for this was simle: for about half an hour “only” 150 spam comments went into my blog moderation list. I was just sitting and watching the process – you all know that nothing can be done at this time. Just we should wait for the wave to pass.

Well, after the wave passed, I started to moderate. A bad thing about WP 1.2 (which I still run here) is that default action for moderation is “do nothing” (which could be reasonable in a normal world, free of spammers). But in our present world I had to click about 150 times at the *correct* rounded circle in order to select a comment for deletion. After about 70 point-and-clicks I’ve got severely mad, and decided to hack WP. I wanted the default action to be ‘delete’, not ‘no action’. Of course, that brought risk that I could just miss some of my real friends’ comments, but we all live in a cruel world afterwards.

In case that you suffer the same problem, here is “how-to for idiots”:

* open `~/wp-admin/moderation.php`. Either copy that to local machine, or open it directly with SSH – it’s your choice
* find the text `value=”later”`. Right after it should stay the text `checked=”checked”`. That’s what “tells” the browser which action should be the default one.
* move the text `checked=”checked”` one line above – right after text `value=”delete”`.
* save. If you have downloaded a copy – upload it back from where you got it

That’s all. It should work now. Now your default action when moderating is “Delete”. Be careful with your friends’ comments.