[Paid] Prune Spam users

[JagWaugh (Andrew Waugh)]

@treb0r

Does anyone have any guidance on the best way to maintain a staged copy of a production discourse forum?

Here’s how I do it:

Build a sandbox to test changes before making them live

Regardless of if you’re a moderator or an admin, you will no doubt at some time think about making some change to your live site and wonder if this will bring shame on you, and/or cause yourself an enormous amount of work to put right again. There is an easy solution to this: build yourself a sandbox! You can restore a backup of your live site to the sandbox and this will give you a representative post and user base, then you can play Dangerous Dan all you want. (If it isn’t your site, then ta…

It’s enough to import a backup just once.

Then you can try anything out in your sandbox, including checking that the latest OS patches and Discourse updates are ok. Our live site is on AWS, but if you run your sandbox on a different provider than your live site then you’ll be open to differences in OS/Droplet changes.

I don’t run any mail on the sandbox, so regardless of what I mess up it won’t start sending stuff to the users.