I still havent found an answer to edit hundreds of thousands of posts. The add and replace tool is a excellent tool for a small to medium forum but what can a large forum owner do to solve this? There has to be a way.
Im in the process of doing this right now and here is an overview of what I have done.
I downloaded
RegEx Magic and used it to build the regular expressions for the BB code I wanted to remove. There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you get a hang of it, you should be able to remove just about everything. RegEx magic will produce PHP specif regular expressions.
Now to do the actual stripping of the BB code, I extedend this
addon, which is essentially an extension of the XF import system. Just replace the VBSEO select with a XF_POST select.
Then add all your regex statements
Finally, update the XF_POST table
This addon will not time out and can run unattended for hours.
RegEx is a fine art and will take lots of practice to perfect. Before updating the XF_POST table, I created a temp table with columns for the original message, and columns for each regex I used, which allowed me to perfect it.
This is very tedious, can be frustrating and should only be attempted by someone who has some php skills and a development environment with a working debugger.
I cant release this as an addon as its specif to my version of php, plus it imports other stuff and it was quickly hacked together.
