XF 1.2 Massive Spam attack

[Scott Dixon]

My forum was hit with a massive amount of spam over the past couple of days. Hundreds of users registered and posted 2-5,000 threads despite activating the reCapthca option instead of my regular questions and answers.

My problem is, when I click the spam cleaner to remove these posts it sits there for about 45 seconds and doesn't seem to do anything.

 

[Jeremy]

Is the request timing out?

You can batch remove the threads from the ACP.

 

[Scott Dixon]

Yeah the request is timing out. After looking at some, a few of the users have over 7,000 posts. Is there an sql I could use to show users with more than 1000 posts and remove them and their content? If I can't remove all of this I'll be forced to shut the forum down

 

[Jeremy]

Removing content directly isn't recommended. If they are threads, have you attempted to batch delete them?

 

[Scott Dixon]

Yes I have but it times out. I could select fewer but with the huge number of them that really isn't an option

 

[Jeremy]

The batch update threads is a timed based batch system, so it shouldn't be timing out. There is a configuration variable you can use to set it to be lower than it currently is, but I don't have the name off hand right now (it should be in the manual).

 

[Scott Dixon]

It's not giving a timeout message, the little progress bar thing just stops and nothing gets removed.

Sorry, I misunderstood what Batch Update threads was. I was selecting them all and deleting, and tried clicking spam for the user but both stopped working like I said above.

The batch update seems to be working, it's at about 18,000 deleted now.

Thank you for the help!