Best course to take, to delete 1000's of spam thread?

[azn_romeo_4u]

I haven't used my forums in a long time. It's in active, but I wish to leave it open for archiving purposes. HOwever, I been away for so long that, it has filled up with spam. How do I go about deleting these spam? I have a dedicated mysql server, but for some odd reason I can not delete more than 40 threads at time. (Time out error) If I manually delete all the threads, I expect this to take weeks.

[AliMadkour]

you can delete them from AdminCP->Threads & Posts->Prune

[azn_romeo_4u]

So if I wanted to delete every single thread created after 11/01/2012, what would the settings be? It's sorta confusing me.

Original post date is at least X days ago - 100
Original post date is at most X days ago - ???

Or should I just put nothing for the 2nd option.

[AliMadkour]

Use (Original post date is at least X days ago) and leave the other blank

[azn_romeo_4u]

Thank you. Aww...looks like it encountered an internal server error...

I'll have to try smaller numbers.

- - - Updated - - -

Hmm...something is not right. I put

Original post date is at least X days ago - 100

But I see threads coming up from 2010. That's 2 years ago. Am I suppose to put a date there or number of days?

[Trevor Hannant]

Original post date is at least = anything older than that date

[azn_romeo_4u]

Okay thanks.

Is there any way I can do this at the command line? Also would it be easier to just move the threads in a dump forum for now?

- - - Updated - - -

LOL....I managed to move all the spam posts to one hidden forum. Wow 850k threads, 890k posts.

Now I just want to nuke the forum. But it seems to freeze on me. How can I properly nuke this forum? I have to prune again? Is there a way I can set up a scedule to prune like 1000 threads per hour on this forum for the next month?

[azn_romeo_4u]

Can anyone help with how to mass delete using cron or something? Like 200 every hour from one particular forum?

[azn_romeo_4u]

Okay one last bump...there has to be an easier way.

[Lynne]

If you want to write a custom script to do something, this isn't the site to ask about it. You should ask over on vbulletin.org, the modification site.