Mass delete of welcome PM from all users
 

Hello all.

I've a situation where there are close to 20k users who have their original welcome PM message left in their inbox and no other PM. I suspect that this is causing the maintenance script which scans the PM table to take longer than it should and as a result it is sometimes slowing down the forum.

I want to perform a mass purge of all of those messages from the database. I wrote two simple SQL statements which I used on a test copy of the forum database and didn't notice any errors. Those statements are:

delete from `forumPrefix_pmtext` where message like 'Thank you for registering%'
delete from `forumPrefix_pm` WHERE pmtextid NOT IN (select `pmtextid` from `forumPrefix_pmtext`)

When running those on the test database it seems to have deleted everything I wanted and the test forum seems to behave without issue.

Does anyone know of any reason why performing those statements would be bad? I didn't see any explicit database associations which would be broken by performing the operations directly with SQL.

I know vBulletin has the option to list all users with only 1 PM via the admincp but honestly it isn't realistic to use those drop down boxes to delete PMs for 20k users.

You would only need to delete them from the 'pm' table. The pmtext table is cleaned automatically.