[Forum] Mass remove links?

[whitey10tc]

I need to mass replacea lot over 300 dead links throughout the forum. These are located in numerous members posts. Is there a sql query that can be ran?

Why, some might ask, the links are to a file sharing site that is seized and we don't want them. We would prefer to remove and replace with a message to contact the poster for the file.

[John Lester]

I don't have a local host set up so I didn't test this, but I found a solution in another thread.

https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php/409557-Any-way-to-update-links-in-posts-after-domain-change?p=2351915&viewfull=1#post2351915

[BirdOPrey5]

You will be hard pressed to do this with a query because the link is never going to be the same. Removing just the domain will still leave left over /path/to/file/ junk.

Unfortunately there is no easy or built in way to remove multiple unique links. The closest thing would be to download and install Impex, inside impex is a tool called cleaner.php

cleaner.php was designed to help people edit post content after importing to vBulletin- You need to have a fairly advanced knowledge of PHP to use it- and you need to setup a regular expression that can find the pattern of all old links and replace them with the text you want. It is not easy but it is possible.

Obviously you need a database backup before you begin messing with any of this.

[John Lester]

Can't he use a wildcard after the domain name in the query to cover the path/names ?

[BirdOPrey5]

Can't he use a wildcard after the domain name in the query to cover the path/names ?

Good idea... Off hand I was thinking % and _ wouldn't be useful because neither would be appropriate.

However using a wildcard to search for everything EXCEPT a space or line break will probably work in the vast majority of cases.

http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_wildcards.asp