Thread

I week ago I started cleaning up all the members on our site.  We had over 10k members and so far I am down to 7k.  I would say that 90% of the memberships are all spammers.  I am mostly using a template I found here that searches them out and lets me delete them.  It works great but slow.  So today I going thru the member list and trying mass deletes.  I have about 3k members that don’t show a last visit at all.  Can I assume those are all spammers and just delete them all?

Right now we don’t have any spam preventative mods, but will be adding some very soon.  Need to do an upgrade on the site first.  Just trying to clean up the member list while I wait.

Thanks

I’d say yes, any accounts that have never logged in are usually spam accounts. You could err on the safe side and not remove anything unless it’s over a week old just in case the registrant intends to login the next day.

Also look for patterns with email addresses, especially not regulars like gmail, hotmail, yahoo. Often a spammer will create several accounts using a fairly unique and unheard of domain, I’ve seen patterns where they add 10 accounts per email domain, all in sequential time/date.

Additionally look for foreign email domain extensions, eg .ru is popular with spammers but if you don’t attract Russian users there’s a high probability of spam.

Thanks for the info.  We do require self confirmation and I keep the pending members cleaned up.  Would love to set up something where if they don’t confirm after a couple days then they are deleted.

Hi Matt76,

ExpressionEngine doesn’t have function for expiring unclaimed registrations, but that sounds like an excellent Feature Request!

Since you have a great discussion going here, I’m going to move this into COmmunity Help.

Cheers!

Thanks Dan.  I deleted over 3000 pending members the other day and a lot of them dated back when the site was started a couple years ago.

If you’re having trouble with member spam be sure to check out and contribute to http://projectcerberus.com/