Removing vBulletin Correctly

[RealtorDC]

Hi Guys,

I'm a real estate agent who thought it would be a good idea to install some forums on my wordpress website.. but it turns out I think it is putting so much strain on my server and possibly google bot is getting lost indexing forums it isn't hitting my main site as much.. my traffic has dropped off the shelf since I installed and bots have been posting spam.. a lot less since I added a test question, but some still pass...

I want to uninstall it correctly and put it on its own domain..

Would it be bad to just go delete my /forums folder via ftp.. what would be the correct way to do this? I have nothing to save.. I've spent a good bit of time deleting spam.. but no posts to save..

[kh99]

The changes that happen as your forum is used are mostly in the database. But you say you have nothing to save anyway, so there's no reason you can't simply delete the /forums folder. If you're planning to reinstall it you might want to save the file includes/config.php so you can see how you had it configured. Also if you're going to start over, you probably want to delete the database (using phpmyadmin or other mysql tools).

One issue is what happens to users trying to go to your forums. They will just see a "page not found" error. It's possible to use .htaccess (if you have access to that) to redirect those users somewhere else.