Remove (Move) all posts by a user

[CarolineS]

Is there a way to remove all posts by a user? It seems like a feature that should be there, maybe as part of a user ban, but I can't seem to find it.

We are being repeatedly hit by spammers the last couple of days and cleaning things up would be much simpler with a "move all posts" option available on a user profile. At least on our community, there are no batch processing options available on the profile. What am I missing?

Thanks!

[CarolineS]

So I've found Mark all posts by a user as spam - but the "Mark all content as spam" option doesn't show up for me, probably because we don't have the Spam Quarantine turned on. Spam Quarantine had so many false positives when we turned it on a while back that I had to turn it off. But maybe I'll try again...

[lilim · Accepted solution]

It may be worth enabling Spam Quarantine just for this spam cleanup. I imagine you can disable it again once you're done and are considering your long term options.

I used to manage a large community that would get hundreds of spam posts a month -- thousands of spam posts during "attacks".  The Spam Quarantine definitely caught a lot of false-positives, but the data always showed that it was worth it in comparison to how much spam was caught. 

The addition of the "your message was flagged as spam" notification was great for helping new users understand what happened. I also set up a "whitelist" role that I could manually apply to new accounts when we saw them get flagged as false-positive spam. You can also build that whitelist role into your ranking system. I also added the "bypass spam" permission to employee and super user roles.

[CarolineS]

Thanks Lili! I will take your advice and turn it on until these attacks have subsided. I did a big cleanup at 2am that then got me distracted on my computer until like 3:30am which is no good. 

Is that a new job I see in your footer? Congrats!!!

[CarolineS]

WOOOOO, Spam quarantine correctly caught about 50 messages tonight; that's 50 messages I didn't have to move. Yay! 

[tyw]

A handy tip in addition to the spam filter for 'cleaning' accounts that didn't submit spam, but spammed multiple topics etc. 

1. Do a blank search followed by entering their username in the Author option.
2. Click Advanced, ensure View results by is set to Specific posts
3. Click the options button and turn on batch processing
4. Run the search again, click any post and use the Options menu to move in bulk

[CarolineS]

Thanks, @tyw! Good trick!