Gallery overrun by spammers

[deeblite]

Hi there everyone.  This is my sob story. 

I have recently inherited the role of "web guy" for my anime club.   Years ago, the club had a Coppermine set up, but the didn't have it locked down properly, and it started to be overrun by spammers.  Rather than lock things down properly, they decided to just abandon it- but they didn't uninstall it, so it's still there, and it has the only copy of about 500 of our old photos. (Yeah yeah, I know).

So I came in, and saw this situation.  I saw that the thing was STILL getting new spammer user signups, several years after it had been abandoned. I saw that it was running a VERY old version of coppermine.   I went in, got the thing locked down so no new users could sign up (so at least the hemmoraghing has stopped!), got it upgraded to the current version, and started going through the user list to clean out the spammers, hoping to salvage the good stuff.  I actually DID manage to get all of the spammers FILES cleared out.   

Then I looked at the sheer number of spammers and spam comments still in there, and wept.   The user manager has over 1,200 pages of users- and only the first 2 of them are legit users.   It will probably take me somewhere in the vicinity of 100 hours to get those all deleted.  There are still tens of thousands of spam comments I need to get rid of...

So what I am asking of this forum is this-
What should I do? 

Is there a faster way to clean out the spammers than just using the user manager?  Some kind of plugin, or something? 

Is there a way to just extract the photos, start over, and re-upload them to a fresh installation? At this point, the only files left in the gallery DO seem to be ours..

Should I just scrap the whole thing and call the old photos a loss, tell the rest of the group to chalk it up as a lesson learned?

Your help and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.   

[Αndré]

You can batch-delete user accounts and comments with a simple SQL query. You can also just copy the albums directory to a fresh installation. It's your decision. I can help you with the SQL query if you want to keep your current gallery, but I'd need some more information.

[deeblite]

Thank you, rather than messing around with the SQL I think I'll just copy the albums folder over.   

Just to make sure I'm understanding correctly- The new install will automatically see the old galleries, but not the comments?

[Αndré]

The new gallery will see nothing automatically. After you copied the albums directory to your new gallery, you can either batch-add the pictures to your albums (which you need to create in advance) or try the MassImport plugin, which will create the category/albums structure automatically according to your directory structure.

[deeblite]

Ok, thank you very much.