Nevertheless, when miwatj.org (the Miwatj Health Aboriginal Corporation‘s ostensible new site) turned up neglected and overrun by post and comment spam (porn spam, yet), a wholesale purging was in order.

And yet, you destroy the users, and it says “the posts of this user will also be deleted”, and what remains on the first (273!) pages of posts are wave after wave of void posts with n/a as the body and no author. And no way to delete them from the administrative interface! Fortunately it’s possible to purge them directly from the node table of the database. Silly way to do it, but there isn’t much else available, especially not in an elderly Drupal like that one. I’m glad someone posted it to the lazyweb.

Update: for some reason, the above purge took out the entry for user 0 (anonymous) in the users table. That had all sorts of funky effects on the authentication machinery and node visibility. Putting a minimal user zero back into the tables by manually INSERTing healed the damage.