The Safest way to upgrade a heavily hacked forum?

[CP,]

A Crucial and Interesting thread for all of those who have a heavily modified forum!

Ok we are on a 3.5.4 and have had upto 40 hacks installed, some hacks required template changes and some required file editing.

Now i know how to backup a database and i know how to restore a database, so no need to tell me that! lol

What i want to do is, i want to get rid of all the hacks and just keep the default settings like, member post count, posts, reputation etc I want our heavily modified forum with over Threads: 12,036, Posts: 432,169, Members: 1,577 basically what we want is a fresh new forum with all our posts, members and all other default settings.

We are planning to upgrade the forum to a 3.6.5 or possibly a 3.5.8. I have tried and tested some methods over the weekend inside a test directory. Ive had some luck but not so great as some hacks are still lingering within the default database tables.

Does anybody, or has anybody ever upgraded a heavily modified forum? Remember i want to loose all hacks ever installed, files and from the database.

What is the way forward and how will you do it?

P.S: No spam please, i would like to read some constructive posts. Cheers. :up: