I decided it was time to upgrade to WordPress 2.0.x. The decision was actually made for me when I logged in and saw I had some 300+ spam comments awaiting moderation. I needed Akismet. Badly.

So, as I boldly think to myself “I don’t need no stinking back up. I can do this blindfolded with 3 arms tied behind my back“, somehow I managed to bork the upgrade.

Now that it’s over and done with, hindsight’s 20/20. I can look back over the entire process and pinpoint every mistake I made. Actually, it was only one: not deactivating the plugins before upgrading. It was on my checklist, just after make a back up, but for reasons not yet known to me, I decided to skip it.

A process that should have taken roughly an hour on the worst day ended up taking four and I’m fairly sure I lost about 20 legitimate comments in the process. On another note, why on God’s green Earth are spam comments not deleted, but instead stored in the database? I had no idea there were nearly 3,000 comments marked with a comment approved status of spam just chillin’ in my DB. (Yes, I’m aware I should probably review my databases more often.)

I’ll spare you the really pathetic details of how I probably lost those 20 comments, but suffice to say it probably wouldn’t have happened if I were wearing my logic hat before making my DB backup.

For future reference, in case I decide to inflict this torture upon myself again:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved='spam';

Now, though, must sleep. Eyelids…heavy. Plugins…upgrade…morning…