Yes, I believe it will only work towards future comments but not the past ones so you will have to take them out manually.
You can remove them using phpmyadmin all at once if you want. http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-remove-thousads-of-approved-spam-comments?replies=11
This is for approved comments. I’ve not approved any of these spams. Would you know if I can replace “approve” with another word to try that?
I’m not sure what you mean? Do you want to get rid of them regardless since they are spam? If so, the myphpadmin route is an easy fix for that.
At the link the OP wants to remove spam that was automatically approved. A commenter then suggests to use the PhpMyAdmin to remove these approved comments.
I don’t have spam that’s been automatically approved. I have spam in the queue that I want to be trashed or marked as spam and for the queue to just show actual comments. Since the suggestion in the link is for deleting all approved comments, it isn’t right for me. That’s why I asked would you know if instead of typing ” delete from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved =”1″;” in the PhpMyAdmin, I could replace “approved” with another word.
