Reverse pruning - delete from a date?
 

Everywhere I've looked I seen that there "isn't an option" to delete users and to just use the prune feature. I've had a spam army register on my forum when I forgot to close it with registration protection enabled. My fault I know, but I have to fix this! However, the prune option is only for past dates.

The forum has been closed for a long time now and I plan to reopen it. This means that the mass registration all happened from a date when no human registrations were made. Therefore, an option to delete users from a date would fix the problem entirely. I can't delete users individually because there are so many, I'd be a skeleton. :erm: I thought about running an SQL query but fortunately read that it could wreck the forum before I actually did it.

The only thing you can do is prune the users. Login to your admincp and go to "Users>Prune/Move Users" and you can do it from there.

I already said that the options are before a date, not after.

Ah sorry I see what you are saying now. This is what I get for not being fully awake lol. You would probably have to hire a PHP coder for that I'm afraid. There is no built in way to remove users who signed up after a certain date.

It'll take quite a while, but I'll do it individually. It won't take as long as I thought it would, but still a while. I think it's silly that such a feature doesn't exist. For something you pay a lot of money for, it should have a primitive function.

But I'll be sure to add lots of spam protection! Don't worry about the tiredness. I know the feeling. :)

Untested!

Well make a backup of your site first, then you could try to run this query:


Set X to the usergroup you want to move them to.

To get the unix timestamp of the date you want see this site, http://www.unixtimestamp.com/

Then you can prune the users in that group.

I agree when I actually got what you were saying and I looked at my vb admincp I was like that is stupid that its not set up that way.

Well I actually managed to deselect all of the "good" members. There are currently 240 bad users online despite the board being closed! I think since I'm deleting a couple of thousand, that's the reason I'm getting this error when I try to prune...

I might have to try ozzy47's method now. I think these spam bots are slowly my server down a lot and as a result, perhaps it's why I get the error. I can't exactly deselect one thousand user checkboxes in the prune form to see if selecting fewer spammers works... :(

Unless anyone has anything to add (especially regarding the error I got), I'll try out ozzy's suggestion in twenty minutes.

Edit: Actually, won't pruning the users in a new usergroup just give me the same error as I'm getting now?

Yeah you might have to chose less to delete at one time if you are going to do it through the admincp.

I miscalculated. There are 5000 members. So I might have to deselect 2500 boxes if I go by half. I need to find a Chrome plugin to do this...

Don't know much about using Chrome plugins I'm afraid. But yeah your server probably just went berserk when you selected too many to delete that happens sometimes.

I've been using this plugin for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...ddon/checkfox/
However, it only works some of the time and it's a pain highlighting and using the check/uncheck option when it doesn't work. I've tested the forum with selecting 400 users. That works. I'll try 1000 tomorrow if it works.

The problem with vB is how archaic its design is. It prunes users on one page of 100, then makes you proceed to the next page where it deletes another 100, etc. This is probably the reason it chokes with so many users. I'll let you know how many it can delete in one sweep tomorrow.

Ok good luck!