Due to my site being plagued with spam, I've been deleting manually thousands of spam accounts.
I have come to the conclusion that 99% of "normal" users do not use the following user 'attributes'.

In reality, they are all just different ways for spammers to advertise. Especially the ones that let you have web links inside them.

So, I would like to know, how do you delete all these fields, or disallow new users from filling them out?

Real Name
Website (URL)
ICQ
AIM
YIM
MSNM
Occupation
Interest
Extra Info
Signature


Also, I would like to disallow new users from posting links in their threads and posts until they have reached at least X number of posts (like 5 posts or something). I thought I saw this option somewhere, but I can only find an option for uploading an avatar after X posts, not one for including links with messages, etc. Does anyone know how to do this too?


many thanks,
Veqryn

(ps: using version 2.4.4 of xoops)

Hi everyone,

I am relatively new to xoops, and I am trying to help a slightly absent site admin to delete spam user accounts. I am in the webmasters group, and also have direct access and full admin rights on the linux server where the website is hosted from.

We have 9000+ user accounts.
Of these, maybe 4000 are spam accounts, and another 4000 are accounts that are registered but never posted anything.

Therefore, to clean up the site, we want to delete all users who have never posted anything (never made a post to the forum).

I have used the "Find Users" section in the 'administrators menu' to go through and delete a ton of users already. However, this is a major PAIN, because it only displays a max of 50 users at a time (even if you put in 99 users as the number to display [and 99 is the max for that field anyway]), AND after you delete those 50, it doesn't even take you back to the list of users, so you have to do the freaking search again.


So, here are my questions:

How can I delete lots of users at a time?
Specifically, how to delete all users who have never posted before?

I know some SQL so if I can get access to the database that would be awesome. However, I do not see any links anywhere to see the database. (I do not see a link to 'phpMyAdmin' anywhere, even though i see it mentioned a couple times on this forum.)


And secondly, after I have deleted all these spam users accounts, how can I delete all forum threads by "Anonymous" users?
(ie: users who no longer exist in the system because I have deleted them)


I would like to avoid searching for the users by hand, avoid deleting them in small groups of 50 or 100 (if I could show 1000+ users per page on the "find users" screen that would solve it for me).


many thanks,
Veqryn


(i think we are using version 2.4._ of xoops)