Best way to clean up database?
 

I have been using vbulletin since 3.0.3 and well I have installed and uninstalled quite a few hacks over the years. But I am noticing that a lot of hacks don't UNinstall themselves all that well and they seem to leave garbage in the database. I noticed also mostly in the phrases and random tables in the database. So what I would like to do is somehow start vbulletin from SCRATCH. Then just reinstall all my hacks. BUT I obviously want to keep all my threads, posts, members, private messages etc. Sorta like doing a fresh install of windows and then just reinstalling all my programs. Is this possible?

I thought about possibly creating a fresh install of vbulletin and then importing certain tables that vbulletin uses from scratch, but I'm not sure this will work because one table that I know is used is the PHRASE table which obviously would have most of the junk I want to get rid of.

You might try installing a fresh board then use the Impex script (from vbulletin.com downloads) to import all important data to the new DB. Make sure you install the test board under an unused username just to be safe and also remove the impex script afterwards.

Post back how it works for this. :)

ImpEx is the tool for this task. You must be aware however that it will renumber all the id's in the database, so old links to threads etc.. will not work anymore as they will have a new threadnumber (same for posts, users etc...)

Ouch, sounds painful lol