If you have 1000+ comments awaiting moderation, the only possible explanation is that, most of them are spam. Because, if your blog is that popular, you would know what to do already and wouldn’t be reading this at all.
What you need is Akismet. But you probably heard about it already, installed and configured it, and no, nothing happened.Its filtering the spam after its install, but what will I do with the ones I have already?
You are missing the magic button. On the Comments page in the WordPress admin, you will see a button, Check for Spam:
Click it. Depending on the queue length, it will take a while. I just did this for a website, they had around 2500 comments awaiting moderation and it took about 2 minutes.
Akismet says: 83% of all comments are spam 
8 Comments
Arun is amazing. I learn something new everytime I come here.
I had a client with over 4,000 comments, (since he had never activated askimet).
Arun saw that and cleaned it up for us in 5 minutes.
Pretty amazing when you consider the only other way we thought we could get rid of that many comments was per page. If you need any kind of website or blog work hire him!
He is amazing.
Thanks Linda! You are awesome
In my experience its true, the percentage 83 % is less, Now Akismet is failed to catch some spams
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Yea, but if we didn’t have akismet, the only job we would be doing is checking for spam
am already using Akismet and its the most important plugin to have on wp blog
Exactly, without it, we would be spending most of our blogging time in moderating comments. I hear wp-hashcash is also a good one
Absolutely, there is no other plugin with as much spam awareness DB as of Askimet.. personally this is the only plugin i use for spam control and is very effective !!
Surely 2 minutes is above the maximum execution time and would just do half of them and then send a 500 error?
I agree though, Akismet is amazing
~Callum