Reverse pruning - delete from a date?

[Outlaw Mantis]

Everywhere I've looked I seen that there "isn't an option" to delete users and to just use the prune feature. I've had a spam army register on my forum when I forgot to close it with registration protection enabled. My fault I know, but I have to fix this! However, the prune option is only for past dates.

The forum has been closed for a long time now and I plan to reopen it. This means that the mass registration all happened from a date when no human registrations were made. Therefore, an option to delete users from a date would fix the problem entirely. I can't delete users individually because there are so many, I'd be a skeleton. :erm: I thought about running an SQL query but fortunately read that it could wreck the forum before I actually did it.

[HM666]

The only thing you can do is prune the users. Login to your admincp and go to "Users>Prune/Move Users" and you can do it from there.

[Outlaw Mantis]

I already said that the options are before a date, not after.

[HM666]

Originally Posted by Outlaw Mantis

I already said that the options are before a date, not after.

Ah sorry I see what you are saying now. This is what I get for not being fully awake lol. You would probably have to hire a PHP coder for that I'm afraid. There is no built in way to remove users who signed up after a certain date.

[Outlaw Mantis]

It'll take quite a while, but I'll do it individually. It won't take as long as I thought it would, but still a while. I think it's silly that such a feature doesn't exist. For something you pay a lot of money for, it should have a primitive function.

But I'll be sure to add lots of spam protection! Don't worry about the tiredness. I know the feeling.

[ozzy47]

Untested!

Well make a backup of your site first, then you could try to run this query:

UPDATE user SET usergroupid = X WHERE joindate > 1415325080

Set X to the usergroup you want to move them to.

To get the unix timestamp of the date you want see this site, http://www.unixtimestamp.com/

Then you can prune the users in that group.

[HM666]

Originally Posted by Outlaw Mantis

It'll take quite a while, but I'll do it individually. It won't take as long as I thought it would, but still a while. I think it's silly that such a feature doesn't exist. For something you pay a lot of money for, it should have a primitive function.

But I'll be sure to add lots of spam protection! Don't worry about the tiredness. I know the feeling.

I agree when I actually got what you were saying and I looked at my vb admincp I was like that is stupid that its not set up that way.

[Outlaw Mantis]

Well I actually managed to deselect all of the "good" members. There are currently 240 bad users online despite the board being closed! I think since I'm deleting a couple of thousand, that's the reason I'm getting this error when I try to prune...

unused

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

I might have to try ozzy47's method now. I think these spam bots are slowly my server down a lot and as a result, perhaps it's why I get the error. I can't exactly deselect one thousand user checkboxes in the prune form to see if selecting fewer spammers works...

Unless anyone has anything to add (especially regarding the error I got), I'll try out ozzy's suggestion in twenty minutes.

Edit: Actually, won't pruning the users in a new usergroup just give me the same error as I'm getting now?

[HM666]

Yeah you might have to chose less to delete at one time if you are going to do it through the admincp.

[Outlaw Mantis]

I miscalculated. There are 5000 members. So I might have to deselect 2500 boxes if I go by half. I need to find a Chrome plugin to do this...