XF 1.5 Spam Cleanup Help - Mass Delete / Remove Spammers & Threads / Posts

ProCom

ProCom

Well-known member
A few years ago on an old platform we had a TON of spammers hit our site and create tons of threads and posts. I'd like to clean up all their trash. What's the best way to do this?

I tried deleting the user accounts for the biggest offenders, but that just put all their threads into "guest" posts.

When I go into the DB and look at some of the spam threads, I see "first_post_id" has a "0"?

There are hundreds of thousands of threads and posts. They aren't visible to our members, but the OCD in me wants to clean them out of the DB. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!
 
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How aren't they visible to your members? Are they all in a particular forum? If so, you can use the batch thread tools in the control panel to just empty that forum (or deleting the forum should do that too).

If they're all soft deleted, then it's a bit more difficult. You could do the batch thread tools for soft deleted threads, though you won't be able to target spammers specifically. Posts would have to be cleaned up manually via inline moderation though.
 
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Brilliant, thanks Mike!

Yes, they were soft deleted, so I used the batch thread tool to search for all threads that were deleted with zero posts (32,053 of them) and that cleaned up the vast majority of the spam.

I'm sure there are a ton of posts that are within threads that are soft deleted, but I won't worry about those since I don't think there's an easy way to clean up only deleted posts made by spammers.

Now I'm wondering if I should batch delete all the spammer accounts too or leave them for blocking purposes.
 
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