Newbie admin.

[jemiller226]

Hi,

My wife has been a long-time moderator on a mid-sized vBulletin forum for several years now, and the original owners decided that they didn't have the time or money to continue running it, so my wife inherited it. Because I work in IT, guess who is now the technical contact.

However, I've been essentially dropped in at the deep end--this forum hasn't been maintained properly in quite a long time, and so it's running up against the host's maximum size for a MySQL database. I saw that the "post" table was immense, suggesting that it was time to prune threads. However, whenever I try to follow the instructions in the vBulletin docs, it gets partway through and times out. Fine, I try a limiting my search more...finally, I can get maybe 80 threads pruned at once, but I planned to do many many more than that.

So, is there any better way to do this? Furthermore, what needs to be done once I do the prune? I assume I need to optimize the post table, but what counters do I need to update (since it just says to "update your counters"...but, which ones?!)?

This is all information that seems to just be understood by vBulletin admins, but I can't find it anywhere, no matter how well I use my Google-fu.