Lone Wolf
Well-known member
I inherited responsibility for the vbulletin forum I am now converting. It has been through e107 to vb3 to vb4 and it took forever to clean up the left over files from years of additions and transitions. The database will probably never be clean until we move to Xenforo but I did my best until then. Between old plugins and 4400 PMs lost in the e107 to vB3 conversion it sure was a mess. I understand your pain.
This is exactly what I'm talking about.
Well not knowing their intentions its hard to say. But assuming the plugins don't modify any of the stock data fields such as an encrypted conversations plugin would. Its pretty easy to write a script to drop all tables and columns that don't exist in The stock install. Now this won't save any data you might want to keep from plugins still being used but the importer likely wouldn't either unless it was being hooked into.
As software becomes more lay person friendly, more and more Admins without technical knowledge are starting up sites. Most of them (like me) wouldn't have a clue about what you just said re: scripts that drop tables but they know how to transfer data to a clean install.