To do the news ui removal that I just posted about, what I did was edit in-place /usr/src/savane/frontend/php/forum/forum.php /usr/src/savane/frontend/php/include/news/forum.php on frontend.
I didn't see any bits in the database which would support making it conditional, and presumably upstream savane doesn't want these changes as-is. (Sylvain asked me to revert an earlier commit I made.) We somehow have to disentangle ourselves from upstream so we can commit changes without messing them up -- our situation is only going to get worse. There are already tons of uncommitted changes, and committed changes not live on our host. But I don't understand git anywhere near well enough to do that. Meanwhile, I'll try to figure out the sql for deleting the actual spam items. Unfortunately it seems some early follow-ups are real. karl
