Old comments are gone!

[longhairfish]

Another self inflicted task assigned to me from me.

In my other post I mentioned deleting missing user profile pictures.

It turns out that many of those accounts are closed. Yeah, I kinda knew that.

Digging further I checked the list of all users comments made since 2006. Whoa! This certainly is a social media site!

Just because an account is closed doesn't mean the comments are closed. Something looked over when the site was made.

Reviewing closed accounts (some legit and some spammers) I see possibly a million comments made just by listing 150 users. Jebus!

I listed those accounts from oldest to newest. Currently I will be deleting all comments from those users. Mostly closed accounts from 2006 - 2011.

Justification : I did see some spammers. So those go. Some comments were redirects to some stupid website(s). Comments made by users 15 - 20 years ago I can assure you nobody cares about.

Why bother? Many of the comments are posted to closed accounts anyway.

Speed. Why bother looking at BS or totally outdated comments when you look at a users profile page. It makes no sense.

So back to what I was saying, the comments "should" have been deleted when a user closed his account. That never happened. Now it will - manually by me

I took out a million just in a few minutes.

[cumback2018]

Good work, but you could probably go even further.

You could remove all topics (excluding announcements) in this forum that haven’t had new posts for more than a year (or two).

That would make the forum much smaller and easier for users to find their way around.

[longhairfish]

I wish!

The forum? Forget it. Even the IT guys don't know how to fix it. And, it is incredibly difficult for me to delete topics. I get some lengthy SQL errors when I do.

I might poke my nose around again soon. phpBB (this type of forum) is outdated by almost 20 years

Even if I could convince the owners and the IT guys to set up a new forum, transferring all topics would not work.

I guess this forum could be put in read mode only. But I know that would be confusing to some people. Sadly.