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Joined: Aug 2004
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For some reason a spammer (who is not a mod) has been able to add 100+ people to a topic, even though in the CP I have the limit set to 20.

How can I deal with this? Can I somehow erase this PM from the system because tons of people are getting upset. Of course every individual person can "eject" themselves from the topic, but this is hardly a solution...

What's the best way to delete this PM (or others like) it completely?

Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 4,057
Joined: Jul 2006
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Wooo that's a tough one.

By removing the spammer from the topic is only going to do just that.

Deleting him, will only remove him from it too.

That's a problem i say...

If that's happened i think this should be over in BUGS.


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People who inspire me Isaac ME Gizmo
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I'm open to all suggestions, even a database query that would wipe this one clean.

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Any ideas for getting rid of this one, maybe by using database queries/commands?

Even damage limitation would be good, like kicking everyone out of the topic... or replacing the PM content with something else.

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Originally Posted by Conrad
Even damage limitation would be good, like kicking everyone out of the topic... or replacing the PM content with something else.


Messing with kicking out the topic is not gonna be fun if you want to do it clean. Things with new PM markers, unread pointers etc.

Replacing the message is easy as... well, easy smile

Unban the user if you might have banned him, become this user, and just edit the PM they sent. Don't forget to set his ban again afterwards.


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Carpal Tunnel
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Should be able to easily change the content of his/her post via MySQL query.

Locate the specific string and then do a replace on all users where found. Just make sure you do a proper query and update and make sure you have a DB backup first.


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I have been able to unban the spammer, log in as him, and edit the PM. So far so good.

Can I somehow kick everyone out of the topic by any normal means? Or maybe there's a MySQL query I can use to accomplish this?

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Thing is, getting rid of the PM is easy, find out the topic number, remove it from the PM tables, and *POOF* gone.

What would be messed up is number of unread PM's. It would be great for the new content rebuilder in 7.3 to also clean up unread PM counters, that you could run after some PM cleanup in cases like this.


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Thanks, man. Would it be possible to run a database query just to remove everyone from the topic? Would that mess up any counters?

P.S. There should be more admin controls over PMs, including filters that would immediately bring certain PMs to the admin's attention if they include certain words/URLs.

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okay. I decided to dive into this to be prepared if something this would actually happen to me.

As I said, getting rid of the PM's isn't so much the problem, it's basicly 3 tables to clean up, where only one is really important. Cleanup up the rest basicly "Cleans up" to not leave any unused data.

Code
delete FROM ubbt_PRIVATE_MESSAGE_USERS WHERE TOPIC_ID=37457;
delete FROM ubbt_PRIVATE_MESSAGE_TOPICS WHERE TOPIC_ID =37457;
delete FROM `ubbt_PRIVATE_MESSAGE_POSTS` WHERE TOPIC_ID=37457

query 1=has to be done. This table tells UBB which user is in which topic.
query 2+3 do the cleanup. They remove te actual message, and the actual topic.

These are sample queries to get rid of specific private topic. You can find out the number by simply opening the private topic. The number is in the URL.

Now, the cleanup of the unread PM's. Well, for that I looked around in the ubb code and found something I could use. I cooked it together as a hack, and posted it on ubbdev.

It's an addition to the clear cache button in control panel, so it will also update the cached unread PM count for each user.

This will allow you to do whatever database cleanup you want, and in the end fix all the new PM counters.


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Joined: Jul 2006
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Excellent,
Now wouldn't it be great if i could tagg that as a favourite post wink


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