Forum Merge Many Accounts to One???
 

I have* as I'm sure many of you do* a long list of users who haven't been to my forum for* say* 180 days or longer (some are five years) and who only ever posted one or two times.

I've created a user called "Newbie Collection Agency" with the intent of merging all of those old* dead accounts into the one. I don't want to delete them* the traditional "pruning" way* because I don't want to delete their posts and I don't like having deleted accounts shown in the forum.

So I ask: is there any way to make the "merge" functionality any easier? I've got several thousand accounts I'd like to merge into the one account. Any ideas? Tips? Tricks I might try? I highly doubt there's an official way to do this.