I agree that the concept of minibb is to keep itself mini. But any mini forum will continue to grow and has the potential to become a mega. And so arises the need for an effective pruning solution. It might be OK initially to view older posts one by one and delete them. But what about forums that might be generating 100s of posts. It simply becomes a tedious job to delete posts one by one. Any forum software is incomplete without an effective pruning solution.

Which way do you see it working without affecting the "correct" topics?

I suggest to have a check-box beside each topic to be able to mass-delete topics. As time goes by, there are many topics that grow old and carry no relevance for the preset moment. One can safely delete those by just looking at the title and/or the number of replies. For example, in my forum there is an introduction forum where people just introduce themselves. Now I just need to allow those posts to stay there and delete later, as it wouldn't be of any value later. There are many topics in other forums too, which have no value at the moment.

I'm listing some topics from my forum as a example. Most of these were created in late 2005 and early 2006 and I have not seen their content. I just randomly picked them. Now from search engine perspective, it's highly unlikely that anyone is going to land on these pages as they have very vague or absolutely no keywords. From the user perspective, it is also very unlikely that a member will even be tempted to read the thread, forget going through 12 pages (each having 50 topics). So by allowing such topics to stay, I'm simply wasting a lot of resources and creating a mess later.

I agree that there is some risk of losing some good posts but then we are building a discussion forum with limited resources and not a knowledge base. I have seen that members don't even bother to use the search function and keep asking the same thing. So there is a probability that the lost topic will be covered again.

Another bother would be regarding memberships. Any forum owner would agree that there will exist a large percentage of members who are just lying there only to inflate the member count. It would free up a lot of resources if there were a solution that would identify and remove users that have not made a single post or logged in the last X months.

Thanks for listening.

To my mind, it also will be a good idea to make a solution for mass-moving topics. Few days ago I decided to make a new forum. and I need to move some topics from one forum to a new-made. It take me nearly an hour, because there were too many topics to move.
I don't know how others, but I need such a function as mass-deleting members.

As far as I know you can do it easily from Admin panel.

Thanks pal!

I guess the only thing that's missing from this amazing software is the pruning/mass-moving option.

I think delete checkboxes on the forum topics pages (vtopic) would be useful and it shouldn't be difficult to implement.

Regarding deleting uselsess topics in the Introduction forum (or any other not relevant forum); I personally prefer to delete such forum once a year (for example) - I especially mean a forum that is unavailable for the public as otherwise when creating a new forum it will have a new forum ID, which is not good if other sites link to the main forum page. Even though I think it's good to realize pruning messages will not help on the long run so one way or the other you're looking at buying a dedicated server to handle everything. Pruning would just put off this decision in time :). I myself am in a similar situation and realize it will be the only senseful solution.

It is difficult to implement, specially regarding all topic-related add-ons... that's why I can't share for it right now.

It doesn't matter whether you use dedicated server or not, you have to prune your forum. You simply can't let go. It'll be a huge mess later and you'll have to deal with it someday.


You have at least listened. That's enough Paul.

OK, now I realize it is difficult and may not be 100% workable (forgot about the addons..).