so I would fix it like this in this order
for all these, by default worpdress/bbpress will usually display 20 items per page. if you look at the top right of the edit topics/replies/users page, you will see a dropdown box labelled ‘screen options’ – you can then set the no. items a page – so set this to say 50 or 100 to be able to do the process more quickly.
1. REPLIES
If you haven’t already marked the replies as spam then do 1.a if you have marked them as spam then do 1.b
1.a
in
dashboard>replies>all replies you will see a box to the left of each reply. Tick those you want to mark as spam – you can use the box left of the ‘replies’ title to select all of them.
Then click the ‘bulk actions’ top left under the replies heading and select spam and click apply.
This will move the spam replies to the spam folder.
1.b
Once you have all the replies as spam, then click the ‘spam’ link where it says
All (xxx) | Mine (xx) | Published (xx) | Drafts etc…. |Spam (xx)
then delete using the same method select all the spam replies (box to the left of the replies list heading) and use the bulk actions to ‘move to trash/bin’ all the spam replies.
1.c then you can leave them there in spam, or delete them permanently by selecting the ‘trash’ or ‘bin’ option in
All (xxx) | Mine (xx) | Published (xx) | Drafts etc…. |Spam (xx)
2. Repeat this process for topics
3. USERS (the bit I think you want to really know about)
In dashboard>users>edit users – you can use the same method to bulk select you spam users, and then using bulk actions choose ‘delete’ and ‘apply’ (as you did for topics and replies). When you do so, it will ask who you want to assign any content to. It normally (from memory) defaults to the first user in the list. If you have deleted all content in 1 and 2 above, then there will be nothing to assign, but if you have spam entries they will get assigned to whoever you say – that can for instance be to assign to ‘admin’
However I have seen sites where admins who use this method create a user called ‘spam user’ with a dummy email address who they assign content to. The logic of this is that if you have missed marking as spam and/or deleting a topic or reply it shows the user as ‘spam user’, rather than making ‘admin’ look like they are spamming their own site 🙂
The explanation above has probably taken longer to type than it should you to do this once you understand 🙂 🙂
