How to turn off forum except for staff

[merefield (Robert)]

You can’t “turn off” the forum and it magically still be useable by anyone.

You could consider bulk unlisting of all topics until you get chance to delete the spam, then relist everything that remains?:

Administrative Bulk Operations

Below you will find a collection of bulk operations that can be initiated from the command line. You will need SSH access, so if you are a hosted customer, you will need to contact the Discourse team about running these commands. This topic is a wiki, so feel free to add or improve anything relevant. Before working with the console it is extremely important that you have a recent backup. Mistakes can always happen! First thing to do is enter your site’s container: cd /var/discou…