Thread

I have a neglected blog, and I just noticed that I have 27000 members. Issue is that almost all of them are spam accounts.

Is there an easy and safe way (properly) to remove a large number of them at once?

Hi, Erin.

First things first, turn off new member registrations.

Second, clear out all Pending memberships. See how many that leaves.

Then it gets tricky. I’d trim down the newer ones based on age. Or if you were feeling particularly bold, I’d nuke ‘em all. (Trimming based on age.)

Make sense?

My issue is that the member page only lists like 30 members at a time so to delete 27000 will take me a loooooooooooooooooooooong time!

Any suggestions?

Check out the following thread: Delete spam members where we’ve identified ‘member_id’

It’s brief, but has some info.

Thanks Kernon!

Does that help, Erin? Note that new member registrations are off by default in more recent versions of ExpressionEngine.

I suppose I could do the opposite, get a white list of the ones I want to keep and remove all the others.

Still have the issue that the screen only shows 20 or so pending members at a time. And after I filter pending, it goes back to Member Groups.

The idea implicit in the other thread I linked to is that you would use, say, phpMyAdmin to perform database queries to delete the junk members in mass; that’s why it was important to know the tables where EE stores member data.

EE stores member information in three tables.

1. exp_members
2. exp_member_data
3. exp_member_homepage

You’d need to back up those tables as a bare minimum before trying to delete rows in the three tables mentioned here.

ok, thanks. Not a great solution, but might be doable if I can find the members I want to keep.

Have you considered pruning your members using Admin > Utilities > Date Pruning?

Another helpful option might be Purple DogFish’s Member Utilities.

I did it via phpMyAdmin, though the Date Pruning would have worked as well. As would the Member Utilities.

Thanks for all the info, feel free to close this.

Glad things are working again for you.. If anything else comes up, please do let us know in a new thread..