The WordPress frontend pulls the comment count for each post from the ‘comment_count’ field in the wp_posts table. obviously that doesn’t get updated when you manually delete spam directly from the database, so here’s a simple ruby script that will update that for you (just define your db variables):

#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'mysql'
 
db = Mysql.real_connect(host, user, pass, dbname)
ids = db.query("SELECT `ID` FROM `wp_posts` WHERE 1")
 
ids.each_hash do |post|
  id = post['ID']
  num = 0
  comments = db.query("SELECT COUNT(1) FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_post_ID`='#{id}' AND `comment_approved`='1';")
  comments.each {|x| num = x[0]}
  up = db.query("UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_count`='#{num}' WHERE `ID`='#{id}';")
end

I wrote several plugins for the blog, and it seems like the company is excited about releasing them to the public. This is pretty much the first significant stuff I’ve done with PHP and I really got to dig around in the guts of Wordpress to add some cool features:

Simple Vote
Adds a Digg-style vote box to posts from a certain category. Only registered users can vote.

Simple Post
Allows any user to post to the blog from a watered down interface, regardless of their privileges. Crazy, right? This way we can let users post to the blog without giving them access to anything in the admin interface.

Easy Author Info
Easily grab any author’s information. For example, you could print out any author’s “About me” text like this:

echo get_easyauthor_attr($author_id, "description");

These scripts need to be cleaned up and made more configurable before they can be released, but hopefully that should be pretty soon.