On Wednesday, 2nd August 2006 at 10:27:00 (GMT -0400), Frederich, Eric P2173 wrote:
Is it safe to manually delete a user from the database [...]?
That's another one I explored, and found the following statement (from 28 March 2006) by Rob Church:
Deleting users is a double-edged sword. It's simple enough to do in SQL but could cause problems when breaking the relational structure of the database. A safe option would be to update the archive, revision and recentchanges tables, altering the numeric user_id foreign key to be 0 for each of the rows corresponding to users you want to delete, then deleting them.
This way, MediaWiki treats the user as nonexistent and won't throw up bizarre errors in obscure places later on.
http://www.archivum.info/mediawiki-l@wikimedia.org/2006-03/msg00479.html