I recently took control of a website which had a phpBB forum linked to it. Now this forum has been live since about 2003 with no real administrator keeping an eye on it... so guess how many spam users it has? Alot! about 28000 of them. What I want to do is start fresh and delete all users except myself of course since the entire site is being refreshed.

I also have the problem that they just keep signing up and the method provided to delete users and block IP addresses isnt exactly suited to mass deleting (gosh the admin area is badly designed).

I also would like to know a good way to mass delete posts if it is needed, I made a new forum and did not realise posting was open to all and in 1 night got about 20 sleazy posts which I had to look at and manually delete>.< There were pictures in some! ick...

Anyway while I have expereience making websites I have absolutely no idea what do do with forums, and my coding knowledge is pretty limited to CSS & html. I am not even sure I understand how the forum works, I have pottered around it and played with a few things but without much understanding :P

Luckily I have a friend who will be helping me with the understanding bit soon but since he didnt really know how to mass delete users or posts I thought I would ask here.

Any help would be great.

Also sorry if this is in the wrong spot.. I was not sure where to place it.

I'm having the same trouble with my phpBB forum...

To mass delete, you must add a mod. Here's the link to the official mod page -

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=376101

Hope that helps!

Michelle

I think that phpbb developpers team did already launched a captcha system integrated on posting on forums no ?

what about SMF do they have captcha kind of thing implemented ..

Before I installed any third party mod, I would consider just using phpmyadmin in your hosting control panel to do the deletions. Thrid party stuff is often quite buggy.

As for the spammers coming back; they will no matter what you do. Ask Chris. He will tell you it is a never ending battle.

Install "Anti-Bot Question." This plugin will allow you to ask users a simple question during the registration process. Make it unique so that robots can't rely on databases of commonly used questions to provide the answer.