XF 1.1 Too much spam to delete

[Vcize]

I got a bit behind on my anti-spam stuff, and a lot of spam built up on my forum. I have several users with 15,000 - 16,000 spam posts. When I try to run the spam cleaner on them I just get a "The server did not respond in time. Please try again." error. It's a decently beefy server, but I guess it just can't handle trying to delete that many posts at once.

What are my options here? I'm comfortable going into phpmyadmin and running a query directly if someone has the query that will kill all trace of the user, their posts, their new topics, their messages, etc.

Or is there some way to get the spam cleaner to work on them?

Secondly, when I run the spam cleaner on smaller users with the "permanently delete" option selected, why do I still see a copy of the deleted thread (only I can see it, as admin)? I understand that it stays there with a soft delete, but with a hard delete shouldn't it be gone?

 

[Jeremy]

Are both your options set to permanently delete (messages + threads)?

 

[Vcize]

Spam Cleaner Thread Action and Spam Cleaner Message Action are both set to permanent. Those are the only two options I see where I can select between permanent and remove from public view.

 

[Vcize]

Regarding the main problem (actually deleting the spam in the first place), anything I can do with that? I've had to take the board down and it's been sitting offline for 4 days now. I really need to figure this out.

 

[Mike]

You'd need to either use the batch thread update system in the control panel (assuming they posted threads) or manually use the inline moderation system to delete the content.

(The spam cleaner is designed to delete the content in a single pass, so it's not designed to handle a large number of posts, for example.)