Home / server / Questions / 379497
Accepted
Bart van Heukelom
Asked: 2012-04-15 08:56:27 +0800 CST

Clean out a large MediaWiki text table

  • 772

I just discovered that an old MediaWiki of mine was infested with spam, and the database table named "text" (which contains the page content) is 3GB large. I've deleted all the spam pages manually, but:

  • The table is still the same size.
  • I wonder how it got to 3GB anyway. There wasn't that much spam (about a hundred medium-sized pages)

How can I get rid of this mess?

If you want to inspect the wiki, it's over here. The database is MySQL 5.0.75.

mysql spam cleanup mediawiki

3 Answers

  1. You should have used the appropriate script in the maintenance-directory. It is there for a reason.

    • 2
  2. Best Answer

    When you delete content from mediawiki using the web interface, it isn't actually deleted (similarly, when pages are deleted on wikipedia, they remain forever and administrators can still view them and undelete them).

    If you want to delete the entries, you will have to write some SQL (using the delete statement; eg. delete from <table> where id = <spam post ID>; for each of the IDs.

    • 1

  3. I made shell script that cleans Users activity and accounts in a MediaWiki database:

    http://www.actiu.net/mediawiki/

    • 0