Deleting old threads with less than 10 characters

[p1woc]

Hi

I have had a good search around the site and it does seem that people are able and willing to run deletes off the post table. Providing we take a back up first is it really ok to delete from the Post table?

If so I have this query... Since upgrading to 3.8.4 we have turned on the minimum length of characters for a post to 10, as we find we have a number of users that love to increase their post count by just using the odd smilie etc... Now I would like to know how many posts we have in our post table with a length smaller than 10 characters long as I believe this will be fairly large. Would anyone have a select count(*) query that can return this number?

If the number is worth dealing with then I would also like to have some SQL to delete the posts where their length is less than 10 characters long. Should I also have a where clause in here to ensure that the posts are not the first posts in a thread to ensure I dont orphan any posts?

Many thanks
Dave