Thread

Hello,

When I go to the “Members” group in the Member Groups section I see there are 53944 members in the “Members” Group and another 14000 plus in the “Pending” Group.

I have no log-in or sign up/in field anywhere on the site.

This has never happened with any other sites I have built using EE.

There is an SEO guy in other location, working on the site. He may have changed something, don’t know. When I built the site I kept everything at the default settings.

Can someone tell me why this is happening and what I can do to stop it?

Thank you, Greg

Member registration spam linking is a known problem with EE 1.x. The link spammers got robots that find old EE sites and inject a ton of members into it with links in the various member fields to bolster whoevers product they are doing seo work for (look at some of the members and you’ll see what I mean). It’s an automated process that bypasses normal membership signups.

You need to turn off new member registration, and change the name of the member trigger word. There’s other strategies for how to deal with the fallout from this sort of problem. You’re not alone in this, as many older EE installs have had this happen, and there are databases of vulnerable EE installs around the internet that these miscreants use to do their seo work. Once you’ve gotten on their list, you’ve got to lockdown your site, as they’ll keep coming at you forever.

And if you’ve got other sites, take steps now to learn how they do this, and how to protect yourself.

Thanks! That was very helpful.

Do you know how i can delete all the members of a group all at once?

Easy:

CP Home ›  Admin ›  Utilities ›  Data Pruning ›  Membership Account Pruning

Pick the member groups you want to prune, set the age of membership you want to delete, and that’s all there is. I think that the times I’ve used this, I only tried to delete 5k or 10k at a time, as it could choke. Make sure to optimize your db along the way:

CP Home ›  Admin ›  Utilities ›  SQL Manager ›  Manage Database Tables

Scroll to the bottom, select all, and optimize.

And think about all of those seo rankings going down for all the script kiddies out there!

Thanks for this info.  We discovered yesterday we had over 78,000 “members”, “guests” and “pending.”  Following the advice here…was able to send them all packing.