pruning efficiently

[weinstoc]

We have a large forum and want to prune it back to about 30 days worth of posts. That means deleting over 1 million threads and as best I can tell the thread manager is able to do about 800 an hour. Does anyone have a command line script to do this, perhaps more efficiently? Or other suggestions how to get this done.

The motivation for this is to make the upgrade to 4.1.10 easier. In a test installation of the upgraded forums, rebuilding the threads takes over a day ... and that is running from the command line.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Chuck

[Max Taxable]

Well, first I would yell, STAY WITH VERSION THREE and AVOID 4 LIKE THE PLAGUE!

Second I would caution against deleting anything, affecting users post count, reputation, and etc. Unintended consequences like, search engines getting alot of 404 errors, etc.

You sure you really want to delete a million threads/posts?

[weinstoc]

I'm interested as to why you would not change to version 4. We are worried about version 3 being end-of-life and need continued support.

We would not be deleting the posts actually, but leaving them up on another vBulletin installation with appropriate linking.

[Max Taxable]

I'm interested as to why you would not change to version 4. We are worried about version 3 being end-of-life and need continued support.

We would not be deleting the posts actually, but leaving them up on another vBulletin installation with appropriate linking.I've never found one compelling reason to move to vB4. It's clunky, massive and ugly. It's like Windows Vista was, trying to be something it's not. In this case, trying to be web 2.0-ish.

It was rushed out and was and is still a security problem. It's getting hacked daily, judging by all the threads here about it.

What do you need support for? Most everything ever needed, you can do or find a way to do. It's like a older car - it's still going to look and run just fine if you take care of it.

Exact reason they are sticking with vB3 here - there's simply no compelling reason for them to upgrade.

If it ain't broke don't fix it.