bipolarmorgan wrote: ↑Fri Aug 09, 2019 11:39 pm
how is it going to break my site? and how are all the tables interlinked?
It depends on what you consider breaking your site. At the moment I can't think of anything which would prevent your site from working. But then again, I'm not confident that I know phpBB thorougly enough - actually I AM condident that I do NOT know phpBB thoroughly enough, despite using it since sometime end 2002. The risks are there for the taking, but if something does go wrong, you shouldn't expect support from the instance whose advice you decided to ignore.
The way phpBB works inherently implies a relational database model, except that the relations aren't forced. And I'm not even sure whether the relationships can be forced considering phpBB can use many database types. Perhaps they can but it would require a lot of extra code and should something go wrong somewhere, repairing would be a lot most difficult.
As long as you know what you are doing, all is (should be) fine but you (experienced as you are) should know that working on the database directly is risky, but for simple and necessary things like creating a recovery admin, disabling all extensions at once, recreating the anonymous user, etc..., things that can be corrected easily if something goes wrong.
When multiple tables are involved the risks aren't hypothetical anymore and then I'm 100% in agreement with the stance that no public support should be given. As to private support, nobody can stop that.
The fact is the users you want to remove were activated but did not post. But they may have sent PMs and received PMs, set notifications, friends and foes, and lots of other things I can''t think of immediately (lack of sleep). I don't see the need for any rush - they're not active anyway so they could be removed in sections over a period of time.