Delete Spam posts
 

Hello all,

I just inherited a forum for a site running on vb 3.5.4 and it has well over a thousand spam posts all over the place.

All of the posts came from the same IP so far as I can tell. Going forward I have things in place to stop this from continuing, but how can I clean up the forums to remove the existing spam posts?

Do they have the same username? You can prune them by username in Threads & Posts > Prune. Or get a list of usernames using that IP in Users > Search IP Addresses > Find > Find posts by User > select them all and delete

Unfortunately they dont all have the same IP although a lot of them do, and they are all different users.

This forum didnt require any verification so each time the guy would create a new account and then a new post.

Is there a way to search threads based on a key word - like viagra or some of the sexual words used and then prune them that way?

You can do a search of posts and then check all the boxes on the right side and use the Moderation Options menu on the bottom of the page to delete them.

One thread alone as over 1000 spam posts in it, thats a lot of clicking ....

I don't know what else to suggest to you. There is the Select All button at the top, so you should be able to grab several posts in one click.

I understand and am appreciative that you are trying to help, but the methods you ahve suggested so far would require me to click well over 100 times to delete 1000 posts. And then that would only allow me to clean out that one thread.

I need a way that I can search posts by keywords in the thread/post body and be able to delete those, preferably all at once.

if there is no such way, is there a plugin that could do that ?

You should be able to delete the thread? If you inherited the site perhaps you can start with a clean slate?

It's such a drag, I hope you find something that helps. I hate spammers :( :down:

I thought about that, but thats just one of the threads, and unfortunately there are a lot of valid threads too.

Really sucks lol

Thank you

Maybe you can get a modification like the One-Touch Spam Ban (called something like that) and when you come across a spam post, use that button to ban the user and delete all his posts. There is a time limit on that of the user having registered in the last 30 days, but you can change that. You can also give regular users the permission to use that mod so maybe a few trusted users can help out by using that mod when they see a spam post.