Can I clean up the event_log database table safely? I've been hit by spam :(

Hey,

a site running MODx 0.9.6 has had no activity for a while (months). Now when I visited the page it just gave me a blank page with this error: Error while inserting event log into database.

I checked the event_log database and it contained more than 400 000 entries. It seems I’ve been hit pretty hard by comment spam although I (thought) I had set up captcha correctly. Captchas has been known to be broken lately though (google et. al.), I just didn’t think it would affect this tiny site.

I don’t know what even logs are supposed to contain, but the typical entries lately contains for example

<snip>
class=&quot;jot-subject&quot;&gt;deltadentalca.org&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;span class=&quot;jot-poster&quot;&gt;&lt;b&gt;Reply #153 on :&lt;/b&gt; Sun March 09, 2008, 00:19:20&lt;/span&gt;
&lt;hr /&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;jot-message&quot;&gt;http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/324.html http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/324.html www.progressive.cojm &#91;url=http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/324.html&#93; www.progressive.cojm &#91;/url&#93; http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/322.html http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/322.html www.progressive.comn &#91;url=http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/322.html&#93; www.progressive.comn &#91;/url&#93; http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/312.html http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/312.html www.progressifve.com &#91;url=http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/312.html&#93; www.progressifve.com &#91;/url&#93; http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/313.html http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/313.html www.progressivfe.com &#91;url=http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/313.html&#93; www.progressivfe.com &#91;/url&#93; http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/314.html http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/314.html www.progressige.com &#91;url=http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/314.html&#93; www.progressige.com &#91;/url&#93; http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/315.html http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/315.html www.progressigve.com &#91;url=http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/315.html&#93; www.progressigve.com &#91;/url&#93; http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/ins07/316.html &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.beotel.yu/~svetlost/BRZINA~/_/
<snip>
[/QUOTE]

etc. etc. The actualy message is much larger and just contains a zillion of these links.

I assure you, I’m not affiliated with these sites

So I guess I hit some limitations in the database. Besides fixing the captchas (any tips for a strong solution here? I seem to be on the spam radar), I’ll need to clean up the database. Now, can I simply delete all these entries from the event_log table? Or would that clutter up something else?

tjalve

You can manually truncate (empty) the table. phpMyAdmin is good.