Newbie Collection Agency

[iacas]

I've created a new user (well, really I used an existing member's account) called "Newbie Collection Agency." It probably doesn't hurt anything, but we have 2000 or so accounts that are still "Newbies." I'm probably a bit OCD, so I'm slowly merging them into one account, the "Newbie Collection Agency" account. Every few months I'll do this similarly.

This is just a heads up. Also, it may take awhile, because right now the only way to merge users is one at a time... and it's a three-step process. So, yeah... it's not exactly speedy. I do ten or so at a time and then get bored.

http://thesandtrap.com/forum/members...lection-Agency

Additionally, I routinely delete accounts if they have 0 posts and haven't been accessed in 45 days, but that's neither here nor there...

[rebby]

iacas,
Here is a hint that might make this a bit faster....

- Take down the forum (or preferably, perform this "test" on a dev forum)
- Rotate your MySQL bin log
- Merge one user account via the admin panel
- View your bin log and make note of the SQL performed to migrate that user
- Re-Enable the forums
- Generate your list of "Newbies" (should be able to determine SQL for this via the bin log as well)
- Perform migration (script w/a loop, recursive SQL, etc, whatever you're most comfortable with)

If you don't have a dev forum and you need to take down production, the production forum should really only be down for a few minutes for you to generate the bin log during migration (the bin log makes it easy to reverse engineer what's going on in the background via the merge, alternatively you could ask on the vBulletin forums, they've been helpful over there for this type of thing in the past). The best part about doing it this way is that it totally removes the manual click-click-click process and should really only take 30 minutes. As a bonus, in the end it would be trivial to write a (reusable) script to perform future migrations as well.