Social Group Spam

[Panzer Max]

Hey guys, we've been hit with the latest thing in spam--members join and create social groups, then spam them with messages. I've seen this in other forums, and so far, no one has provided a smart way to delete all the discussion messages and groups. Sure, I could do it page by page, but some of these groups have 3000 messages. I would like to try deleting them in the MySql database, what tables would the Social Groups discussions be in, so I can be sure not to leave any orphaned messages or discussions, before I delete the Groups.

[Lynne]

Hmmm, I honestly don't know that I would delete them from the database directly. You've got your discussion table and groupmessage (and groupmessage_hash) tables with the actual threads/posts and then your socialgroup table that lists all groups (and discussion/post count) and socialgroupicon with the icon and socialgroupmember with the members and socialgrouppicture with the pictures.

If you do decide to do it via the database, make sure to do a test run on your test site first and see if you run into any problems. And, of course, BACK UP YOU DATABASE before you do ANYTHING to it!.

[Panzer Max]

You wouldn't delete them from the db, why not? What would you do?

[Simon Lloyd]

As Lynne said, there's too many dependant tables to ensure a clean removal that way.

[Lynne]

I would just delete the social group. Deleting the group will delete the discussions/posts also.

[Panzer Max]

By golly, you're right. I deleted the groups, and the messages in the db went away too. Thanks!

BTW, does anyone use Social Groups? On our forum they never took off. But they did serve as a great place for spammers to improve their click count.