Permanently delete discussions from SQL

daylankifky

The issue

Hi, I've been receiving lots of spam lately. I recently had the time to upgrade the core to the latest version and install recommended anti-spam measurements that will hopefully help to keep it under control. In the meantime I was manually deleting the unwanted discussions.

The problem now is that they clutter the admin and moderators view, hiding relevant posts.

I would like to permanently delete the discussions and users that created them. I'm wondering if manually deleting them from SQL might cause issues.

Flarum information

Flarum core 1.6.2
PHP version: 8.1.13
MySQL version: 5.7.40-0ubuntu0.18.04.1

What I want to do:

DELETE FROM flarum_users 
LEFT JOIN flarum_discussions ON flarum_users.id = flarum_discussions.user_id 
WHERE flarum_discussions.hidden_at IS NOT NULL;

DELETE FROM flarum_discussions WHERE hidden_at IS NOT NULL;

I inspected those queries and they are only affecting unwanted discussions and users. Would it be safe to execute them?

Would I need to do something else?

Thanks in advance!

clarkwinkelmann

It's difficult to give any universal answer when it comes to manually executing SQL queries. Flarum has a lot of events that extensions listen to and those events are completely bypassed when modifying the database directly.

With a basic Flarum install, it's probably safe to manually delete any record in the database. The total discussion count per tag might be messed up until a new discussion is created in each tag but this value is not visible in many places and is just informative.

However if you have third-party extensions you should check whether each one might be impacted. For example if you have the Scout extension and you manually edit or delete data in the database, the search index will be outdated and will need re-building.

daylankifky

An update on this: I haven't tried the SQL deletion, for now I'm just sticking with the anti spam extensions suggested here, and deleting the unwanted discussion using mass actions

Thanks clarkwinkelmann and @Tsy for your advices!

daylankifky

Thanks for the quick and informative answer!
(just another prove of the great community behind flarum, a big shout out to all you guys!!)

I imagined that there were no easy answer 😅 . I guess I will backup the DB and give it a try. It is out of my possibilities to analyze each extension.

This is a list of the ones active in my forum:

| flarum-flags             | v1.6.1  |        |
| flarum-approval          | v1.6.1  |        |
| flarum-suspend           | v1.6.1  |        |
| fof-upload               | 1.2.3   |        |
| fof-subscribed           | 1.1.2   |        |
| fof-spamblock            | 1.1.0   |        |
| fof-recaptcha            | 1.1.0   |        |
| fof-masquerade           | 2.1.3   |        |
| fof-formatting           | 1.0.2   |        |
| flarum-tags              | v1.6.1  |        |
| flarum-subscriptions     | v1.6.1  |        |
| flarum-sticky            | v1.6.1  |        |
| flarum-statistics        | v1.6.1  |        |
| flarum-mentions          | v1.6.1  |        |
| flarum-markdown          | v1.6.1  |        |
| flarum-lock              | v1.6.1  |        |
| flarum-likes             | v1.6.1  |        |
| flarum-lang-english      | v1.6.0  |        |
| flarum-emoji             | v1.6.1  |        |
| flarum-bbcode            | v1.6.0  |        |
| flagrow-terms            | 1.2.0   |        |
| blomstra-spam-prevention | 1.3     |

perhaps someone can spot a potential misbehavior with any of these. For example I guess that the statistics might get corrupted, right?

I will then report how it went here in case someone wants to try something similar in the future

daylankifky

Alternatively.. is there a way to completely remove these entries, or at least hide them from the moderator's view wiithout bypassing the Flarum event mechanism?

Tsy

In the past,

I have deleted items via SQL (phpmyadmin), and didn't have an issue. Just remember that if the deleted content is deleted and mentioned elsewhere it redirects to a deadpage.

note: I never sent query commands but manually as mentioned above.