Should a little memberlist spring cleaning be in place?

R

RC

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Jul 18, 2011
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I happened to browse through some of the memberlist and was astonished to see the amount of quite obviously robot registrations from years yonder with no posts.

Just thought to ask if it would be prudent to clean out these zero-post wonders?

Maybe do something quite conservative like select only those who have zero posts and have only logged in once and are older than say 6 months? That should prune a good bunch of spambots away and not impact too many real people...

 
Unfortunately, it's not easy to mark and remove these types of accounts. Are you volunteering to go through them all one by one and delete them?  [huh]

I don't think there's any harm in leaving them in place.
 
I was wondering if there was a way to clean up en mass.

To echo what Shane said about risk, many of those "members" have signed up never respond to their activation emails, so their accounts won't allow them to sign in.  Without signing in they will never have the ability to mine email addresses of legit members.  Even if they did activate, there isn't a way to collect the email addresses of members in quantity.  They would have to do that one by one which isn't something likely to happen.  Now if members post their email addresses or other private info in posts then any search engine can pick that up.

Members have the ability to make their email addresses not visible to other members in their profiles but make it so that if a member sends a PM then a notice of that is sent via email.

Peter
 
You could remove them from the MySQL database directly rather than using the SMF tools.

Looking at the code for searching and displaying members, if they haven't activated their accounts, you wouldn't see them anyway so presumably these ones have been activated.

An alternative might be to change the MySQL query in Memberlist.php to include some of the parameters Reiska mentioned, so that although the users are still in the database, they wouldn't show up in a search or when browsing the memberlist?

I have to admit, when I was helping to prune the GB CREW, paging through the phantom accounts was a PITA...
 
Garry, yes, it is possible to delete them in bulk directly from the database, but best practices are not to do that sort of thing. Data concurrency can cause serious issues with the database and I don't know exactly what other tables rely on the member table. Without knowing that, I wouldn't feel comfortable using that method.

Shane
 
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