Batch Cleanup of Topics/Replies beyond standard pruning

[racketnick]

Hi everyone!
Long-time phpbb user (from when 3.0 was brand new). Just finished migrating to 3.3.
Lot of learning, but proud to have taken care of it myself!

Now.... I have over a million posts in my forum and I'm looking to clean things up.

I have some topics that have hundreds of pages.
It would be nice to keep the topic in place (with it's original posts), but then do a batch delete of all replies. Is that a possibility?

Are there any newer features or utilities that are good for cleaning up a bunch of content while finding a balance of keeping the "good stuff"?

(I'm planning on going through Google Analytics to see what topics get a lot of inbound traffic from search and such -- may bump some in order to avoid pruning of really old items)

Any other ideas or tips to consider?

Thanks for your time!

[warmweer]

Now.... I have over a million posts in my forum and I'm looking to clean things up.

I have some topics that have hundreds of pages.
It would be nice to keep the topic in place (with it's original posts), but then do a batch delete of all replies. Is that a possibility?

It's possible but requires some thinking to define what you want to delete/keep.

Are there any newer features or utilities that are good for cleaning up a bunch of content while finding a balance of keeping the "good stuff"?

The first thing to do is to clearly define precisely what you want to do.
Which topics have to be pruned? What do you want to keep in those topics: the starting post (and user) for sure, but what about postcount, last post_time, last_poster?

Example: do you want to prune topics that are a year old (but could still be active), or topics that haven't been replied to in a year. After posts have been deleted: are you going to keep the user_post_count or recalculate that.

Once you've got the criteria it's fairly simple to delete the intended data from the database.

As posts will be removed, you'll also have to clean your search tables. (but just recreating those is probably faster)

The bottom line = define the criteria necessary to be able to select posts to be deleted and only start editing (that would be using phpMyAdmin or similar) after having made (and tested) a database backup so that you can always revert the changes if necessary