all comments missing

On a site (WordPress 2.8.2) I was receiving strange empty comment moderation requests:

A new comment on the post # “” is waiting for your approval

Author : (IP: , )
E-mail :
URL :
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=
Comment:

Approve it: (blanked)
Delete it: etc.

As I logged in I decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 and I also upgraded the plugins without any problems.

Only then did I take a look at the comments.

The “Posts” tab showed the number of comments for every post but the “Comments” tab showed 0 comments.

In fact all my comments were lost.

I went to check the database with phpMyAdmin and looked at the table
“wp_comments”. It had reportedly crashed.

I do not have much experience with databases and such but I decided to drop the table and replace it with a backup.

From my backup .sql file I copied the part:

# ——————————————————–
# Table: wp_comments
# ——————————————————–

until:

#
# End of data contents of table wp_comments
# ——————————————————–

Then I ran this SQL code in phpMyAdmin which restored the comments in my blog.

I have no idea if it is caused by a hacker, an error in the hosting or an error in WordPress or the upgrade.

I wonder if anyone has had a similar experience. Just wanted to share this so it may help you one day.