[Forum] Need to prune 100,000 users!

[dnebeker]

I've taken over a forum which wasn't managed very well. There are 250K+ user accounts, and at least 100K of them are users that haven't logged in for _many_ years, and never posted.

How can I prune them all? The "Prune" function will only work on batches of 1000 or less. I REALLY don't want to have to manually create 100 groups of 1000 (and it's hard to do given all I have is a signup date to work with). Is there ANY way to increase the limit on the prune function?

vBulletin version 4.1 (.8?)

Thanks for any ideas.

[Lynne]

You don't have to create groups to delete them, just set the "Has not logged on for x days" to different numbers to just get groups of 1000 to delete at a time. (You may want to just close the forum temporarily while you do this and you may be able to delete larger numbers of users at a time. I do about 5000 at a time on my site.)

[dnebeker]

You don't have to create groups to delete them, just set the "Has not logged on for x days" to different numbers to just get groups of 1000 to delete at a time. (You may want to just close the forum temporarily while you do this and you may be able to delete larger numbers of users at a time. I do about 5000 at a time on my site.)

But that means I have to sit and play a guessing game at least 100 times (assuming I guess correctly each time, probably more like 200 times) to do the deletes. It would save hours of work if I could just increase that limit of 1000... I'm not worried about the server getting bogged down during this period -- I just don't want to spend all day trying to make this happen.

[Lynne]

The limit of 1000 is not a vbulletin limit - it is a limit of your server. As I said, I easily do 5000 at a time and leave my site live when I do it. But, I have a two server setup for my site.

[Alfa1]

I have pruned much larger amounts at a time. I would just close the forum and do it by year. Ask your host if your encounter any limits.

[dnebeker]

It's on a dedicated server that I control. If I do 1000 or less, it takes a short amount of time, but it finishes. If I go over 1000, it immediately goes to the next screen and says there is nothing to delete given my settings.

So it seems like there is something about a request size of 1000 or more that immediately fails. If there is a config setting I can change, I'll gladly do it. I just don't know what to change.

[snakes1100]

You would actually have to track the error after trying to submit the request when deleting over 1000 users, it could be a few things.

Check your error logs, you might also want to set php to submit its errors to the syslog as well to track what error its spitting out.

[Lynne]

I would guess that you are timing out (php error). The error will show in your error_logs.

[dougdirac]

I had to prune about 4000 users once. I didn't have to have less than 1000 selected. I just had to do the search and prune about four times. It had about 4000 results the first time, but only managed to nix about 1000 at a time. So i just had to redo the same operation a few times.

[Paul M]

Why do you need to prune them al all ?

They are not having any harmful effect, why not just leave them alone.

[dougdirac]

I my case, many of those users were most definitely spammers from before we installed Spam-O-Matic. They'd create an account and then just leave a visitor message on their own wall that would be a some spammy link.

[dnebeker]

Can anyone tell me where to look for errors?

As far as why clean them up, they're junk spam accounts. I'd like to send an email to users, but 100K bogus emails is not what I want to send (or pay to send).

When I try to do the delete, it doesn't time out -- after selecting Delete and pressing Go, I _immediately_ get a blue vBulletin error box that says "Invalid action specified" and then "no users match your query". This happens every time I have more than 1000 users checked. I've done 998 before and it's fine. Go over 1000, and vBulletin tells me "invalid action specified".

And trying to get groups of 1000 where the only selection I've got is days since last login is VERY painful. This is a 12 year old forum -- there are 16K users waiting for email confirmation that created their accounts 3 years ago. It's a mess.

So how can I find out why deleting 50K users at once isn't working?

[Lynne]

Have you checked your error_logs (if you don't know where they are, ask your host)?

[dnebeker]

Are we talking about PHP error logs? Or some other error logs? I looked in the Apache logs but didn't see anything that seemed important (as far as I could tell).

[dnebeker]

No PHP errors -- still can't prune more than 1000 users

OK, got the PHP error logs setup, and after trying a massive delete, they are empty (Sorry for being so noobish, I'm a Windows guy taking over a Linux/Apache server).

So I still have 100,000+ (probably closer to 175,000) accounts I want to delete so I can send out an email to the real users. But at the moment it's nearly impossible.

Can I delete in the database? Hack the .php pages? Anything????