I've searched through all the questions tagged blogengine.net and not found an answer here. I set up a site with BlogEngine.NET. At the time I never configured for spam comment purposes the spam settings (figuring that, dontcha know, I was going to write such earth-shatteringly good content that all the comments would be just affirmations of how great my content was, with the occasional pithy insight)
Turns out the blog is more of a notebook for myself rather than anything I people have got engaged with (quelle surprise) so now I'm going to turn off comments (at least until I can find a good way to moderate them) but I need to delete the existing spam.
I've tried:
using the admin UI but it times out with "Could not delete comment: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. The statement has been terminated."
writing my own Q&D aspx page to cycle through all the comments but it suffers a similar fate. "Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding"
I then turned to the database itself and from inspection it seems that the be_PostComment table is the place to go so I issued a blanket delete statement there and it deleted all the rows.
However they're still in shown in the UI - is this down to caching by ASP.NET?
It must have been ASP.NET caching, as when I wrote the initial question I had tried (CTRL+) F5 to no effect. I cycled the site and the app pool from IIS and I'm now happy to report that all spam comments are gone.