I added another tool this morning to my Moderator's Swiss Army Knife.
You know, the tool that lets me
* remove like/dislike privileges
* delete all likes/dislikes
* ban a user
* clear out a user's sig line, avatar, interests
* permaban a user
* rename them to something embarrassing
...all with one quick click!
Well, now there's another time-consuming operation I can perform with one click: delete all posts of a given user.
It even updates the "reply count" for each topic, so you don't end up with an empty page 2 or something (this has happened in the past when I went into the database and did a SQL statement to delete all of a user's posts). So that unpleasant side-effect -- the one downside of a QUICK solution -- has been removed. You can't really do it with SQL; you have to use PHP.
So the next time a stupid troll (who needs to get a life) posts 26 times from 3:00 AM to 10:00 AM (while most decent people are sleeping) I can simply wake up and click a button, and it's all gone! You wasted many minutes or even hours, and I wasted 2 seconds.
I like that ratio. I'd be happy to do that all day!
So bring it on, trolls. You're wasting your time. I have the tools now so you waste ALL of your time, and I waste none of mine.
EDIT: (To the troll:) Thank you for helping me beta test the new feature. I discovered that the "last post in each forum" was messed up if that topic got deleted by my script. I fixed it now, so CathInfo members won't be inconvenienced by that in the future.
I also fixed the "last poster in each topic" element, so if I delete someone's post, it will find the new "latest post" and use that.
Long story short, I'm getting this script to a state of perfection so the inconvenience(s) caused by trolls will be almost zero.