We do this, but I've still found that I'm wanting to delete spammer accounts for the following reasons:
1. The spammer accounts are very old and dormant. 2. The spammers continue to make new accounts. 3. The user list needlessly grows with many banned accounts. 4. 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.
-Jeff
-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Elliott F. Cable Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 4:06 PM To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Deleting a user account
Just block them indefinitely...
On May 31, 2006, at 2:35 PM, a@kid wrote:
could you just change the password on the account?
that would leave the edit history untouched but disable any future edits using that account
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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
On Wed, 31 May 2006 17:02:38 -0700, Jeff Lane 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.
This approach might be useful for you: a) add a 'spambot' group with restricted rights to LocalSettings.php: $wgGroupPermissions['spambot']['read'] = false; $wgGroupPermissions['spambot']['edit'] = false; $wgGroupPermissions['spambot']['move'] = false; $wgGroupPermissions['spambot']['upload'] = false; ... any other rights that you need to block ... b) add the spam accounts to that group - manually or by sql c) apply a patch [*] to hide spam accounts from a default user listing, and enable it by adding to LocalSettings.php: $wgHiddenGroups = array('spambot');
This deals with 3 and slightly with 1; it assumes that mostly 1 can be ignored, and that 2 needs to be handled by other protective means - e.g. Rob Church's UsernameBlacklist.php extension. To handle 4 you'd need to rename the account e.g. using Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason's Renameuser.php extension, but you seem to have a handle on that part already.
If you capture a full enough set of restricted rights, there is also no longer a need to block the accounts (although you might consider it wise or appropriate to block them anyway).
[*] http://clc-test.flash-gordon.me.uk/wiki/clc-wiki:Config:Wiki#Spam_account_filtering_patch (draft article on the test site; might not end up as a permanent link)
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