I did not realize but I had the CAPTCHA off and a lot of spam registrations went through my site. I have about 368 members who are spammers.
Is there anyway I can multi-delete the members or if necessary wipeout the entire members list? If it is through script that must be executed in the db, I can. I only have 1 author with 3 stories so far. Rest are spams.
If anyone have any suggestions/guidance, I would appreciate it.
I've deleted ~6,500 members, and I find the easiest is to find them in database. I once had a similar thing happen, so what I did was search in PHPMyAdmin for various terms that were spammy, like viagra, cialis, etc etc. You will want to actually delete them through the frontend interface, though, because multiple tables are affected & it would be hard to keep track of manually. Although I suppose if you know the users in question, you could probably find the section of the script that deals with member deletions & rework it to delete multiples. (Keep in mind also that if you do something like that you don't want to do too many at once for resource use reasons.)
I want to clean it up completely. Do you think it's easiest if I just erase everything and start again from the beginning?
I don't know which tables I must empty. As I said, I only have 1 author and 3 stories. So would it make sense to delete the database and create a new one from the scratch? And then upload the 3 stories again??
Wish there's an inbuilt way to erase non-validated members.
If you know enough MySQL, you should be able to at least find them all by searching for validated = 0. What I would do in your place is take the code for deleting members & rework it to find them based on that. That way you make sure to get all the tables.
It probably would be easier to start from scratch. I think would be easier to export the data for the author & stories. Actually, if those are the only stories then you only need to worry about the author tables, and that's a lot fewer.
That's what I thought too. Easier than deleting the records and missing some relation that would cause further trouble.
I had sent an email to the authors asking them 2 post it again after database purge. They have agreed and I purged it a few hours ago.
But it would be a useful function if they can implement a way to remove all the non-validated members from the database easily.
