Mass Deleting SPAM posts?

[Qwest]

Ok my board is all set up and imported from phpBB

Now I need to get rid of the thousands (yes thousands) of spam posts made while my board sat dormant as a phpBB board.

What I want to do is run a special query for each keyword that is likely spam like cialis, viagra, penis, etc.

BUT... most of the posts are just single posts in threads, so will that mess things up if I do a query direct to the DB like that?

Am I going about this the wrong way? Please help!!

[Antivirus]

yeah, i think it will mess things up. I would handle it like this:

1. Create a new temporary forum called "spam" from within your admin CP.
2. go to your forums, and search for all your keywords like cialis, penis, viagra, whatever... make sure you enable the option to show results as posts.
3. now you can see each result. In the right, click the checkbox (or click check all) then at bottom of screen, in moderation menu, select move posts and click GO.
4. Select "Move posts to new thread" and in destination forum, select the newly-created "Spam" forum and create a title for the new thread such as "spam thread".
5. then click "move posts" and each post should be moved.
6. now go back and repeat the process above for each spam keyword.
7. when you think you've gotten all the spam posts moved, then go to that forum and delete all posts. Doing it this way is fairly simple because you can mass-move them for each keyword and best of all, it won't break anythign in your forum, such as orphaning posts, threads with no content, etc... which is what a manual query might do to you.

[Qwest]

Thanks, that's basically what I was doing but instead I was simply deleting them.

Only problem is deleting 25 threads per page would take DAYS to delete what is likely over 7,000 spam posts.

[Antivirus]

damn, that's a lot of posts.