On 01/06/06, Jeff Lane jeffl@valvesoftware.com wrote:
We do this, but I've still found that I'm wanting to delete spammer accounts for the following reasons:
- The spammer accounts are very old and dormant.
- The spammers continue to make new accounts.
- The user list needlessly grows with many banned accounts.
- The accounts often have usernames that are desired by real users.
It would be nice if Mediawiki could delete the account, and all edits from deleted accounts would be attributed to either a) the last used IP address for that account, or b) simply "User Deleted".
I supposed we could just renamed the accounts to User Deleted ### and just increment the number, but that would only help with #4.
If edits are all the account's done, you can use the reassignEdits maintenance script to assign the edits to a dumb user, such as "Deleted User", and then delete the rows from the users table. You'd need to be sure no log entries, images, etc. referred to the user though.
Rob Church