As you may have noticed, the SearchTempest forums use phpBB. Generally problems I’ve had with it are due to my own ignorance and today was no exception!
I was messing with the forum permissions, and I accidentally gave anonymous guest users the power to ‘bump’ topics. In phpbb, there’s a special function to bump a topic without having to post to it. Essentially it automatically updates the date of the latest post in that topic to the current time, so it appears as if it was just posted, and the topic moves to the top of the forum. (A little ‘Last bumped by [username]’ line appears at the bottom of the post, but I didn’t notice it at first.)
The problem is, apparently there are bots out there that will just go around bumping your posts like crazy if you let them. I’m not sure what they have to gain by this.. possibly just anarchy. Anyway, my temporarily lax user permissions resulted in a whole pile of topics from circa 2008 being bumped to present times. And since the bumping process actually changes the dates of the topic and its most recent post, there’s no easy way to just ‘unbump’ them. I didn’t relish the idea of manually going through my database editing the timestamps of tens or hundreds of posts, soooo I came up with a better solution.
(It probably took me just as long, but I learned some MySQL subtleties along the way, and now I can pass it along, in case anyone else runs into the same problem!) Without more ado, the code to automatically ‘unbump’ phpbb topics: