Deleting sheffield forum

[Waldo]

If it works, my script could delete all of your posts (or blank them) in about 4-7 days, although you'd want to maybe spread it out a bit longer.

 

I was investigating something along these lines, only in PHP. Do a http request for posts by my user ID and update each post (not just wipe), to directly insert any text I like in to every single one of my posts.

 

For users who have a high post count, it makes the forum a useful vehicle for advertisements etc.

[Phanerothyme]

I was investigating something along these lines, only in PHP. Do a http request for posts by my user ID and update each post (not just wipe), to directly insert any text I like in to every single one of my posts.

 

For users who have a high post count, it makes the forum a useful vehicle for advertisements etc.

 

Mine was (predictably enough) written in Python. It uses Mechanize (also available in perl) as a browser object (supports cookies and forms) and Beautiful Soup for parsing HTML content (not really needed now SF is mostly standards compliant).

 

From memory, it could delete about one post a second without breaking into a sweat.

[Waldo]

I mean sending _POST / _GET data to a URL (http address).

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POST_(HTTP)

[kinetic]

It is not possible to remove a profile without manually going through every thread and post ever posted to remove both the posts posted by the account and every answer to those posts, quote of those posts and discussion related to those posts. Just deleting a profile won't do any of this and the moderating and admin team do not have the time to do this for an account that may have hundreds of even thousands of posts.

 

What we CAN do is to close an account and, if required, rename it so that the original account name is not associated with posts, and that can be done through the Helpdesk.

 

That's just simply NOT true. The back end database will contain a unique ID for every poster. Similarly, every post will have unique ID which will be linked to the UID of the poster (as well as every action carried out on the forum by the poster - PM's, etc). I could write a SQL script in 2 minutes that would link the user ID with the post ID and it would queue both to be deleted with the simple push of a button (you'd just run a script at say 4am; so as not to burden the DB). Quotes (as long as they are done using the quote button and not copy/pasted into quote tags) will also contain the ID of the original Poster (again, a simple SQL purge would delete those posts). They are called relational databases for a reason!

 

Whilst I agree that it makes reading threads rather annoying when posts have been deleted (I'm surprised you're actually aware of this, as you seem to do it yourselves on a regular basis!), it is entirely possible to do it without you having to manually do it yourselves. In exactly the same way as IMDB, Facebook, etc do! (do you think Mark Zuckerberg sits up all night going through every account and post deleting them all individually)

 

Edit: An afterthought: The biggest problem would be hacked accounts (as a hacker could delete the account and every post ever made). You'd need to implement some kind of validation (e-mail maybe).

Edited September 18, 2012 by kinetic

[Tradescanthia]

I had all posts removed from a Cancer patients forum. I had been advising another member how to approach his employer regarding 'phased return' and informing him of his rights under the Equality Act 2010.

I then realised I had been posting using my own name and certain events convinced me that my own employer had accessed the forum........not good !!

I contacted the Admin guys and all posts were deleted within a couple of hours. I now use a different name so I cannot be victimised.

[Waldo]

Problem is that users do not have direct access to the backed MySQL database. We do have indirect access via a set of php pages, which we can make requests to (just looking now at showthread.php, and there are a whole host of others), and so admin our own posts without any help from mods or admins.

[janie48]

Mine was (predictably enough) written in Python. It uses Mechanize (also available in perl) as a browser object (supports cookies and forms) and Beautiful Soup for parsing HTML content (not really needed now SF is mostly standards compliant).

 

From memory, it could delete about one post a second without breaking into a sweat.

 

Is this a secret code.

[melthebell]

Is this a secret code.

Yeah for were not worthy

[max]

I've got a suicide script I wrote years ago, but I've never fully tested it. If it works, it will methodically go through every single one of my posts and blank it with 500 characters of random garbage. Could take a while though.

 

Given the content of a lot of posts, think fortnightly collection thread, I think you must have already run this using several user ids as a test.

[Phanerothyme]

Not seen the thread, I can only imagine.