A spammer has created accounts and pages on my wiki. I have removed the pages via clicking. I cannot find any button or documentation on how to remove his accounts. Lots of documentation on blocking, but none on removing. And on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Right_to_vanish it even says "User accounts, once created, cannot be removed." Do I just remove his row from the http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_table Or maybe the pros never remove accounts, but just block forever? Smarter?
I suppose the next user to register will inherit his user number, which means anything else in the database then is attributed to the new user, e.g., the deleted pages...
jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
A spammer has created accounts and pages on my wiki. I have removed the pages via clicking. I cannot find any button or documentation on how to remove his accounts. Lots of documentation on blocking, but none on removing. And on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Right_to_vanish it even says "User accounts, once created, cannot be removed." Do I just remove his row from the http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_table Or maybe the pros never remove accounts, but just block forever? Smarter?
Just block them..if they are offending, rename them to some other name..it won't take space as to need to remove them...
I suppose the next user to register will inherit his user number, which means anything else in the database then is attributed to the new user, e.g., the deleted pages...
Yes, I think so too..
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On 06/01/2007 10:11:07 PM, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
A spammer has created accounts and pages on my wiki. I have removed the pages via clicking. I cannot find any button or documentation on how to remove his accounts. Lots of documentation on blocking, but none on removing. And on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Right_to_vanish it even says "User accounts, once created, cannot be removed." Do I just remove his row from the http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_table Or maybe the pros never remove accounts, but just block forever? Smarter?
Yes, much smarter.
I suppose the next user to register will inherit his user number, which means anything else in the database then is attributed to the new user, e.g., the deleted pages...
Right, or else there will be references to a non-existent user, also bad.
Jim
On 02/06/07, jidanni@jidanni.org jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Do I just remove his row from the http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_table
If the user has made edits, then removing rows from the user table cause theoretical loss of referential integrity. Now, to be honest with you, I can't think of any conditions where this would cause an actual problem; "undefined behaviour" is the phrase we use.
What I'd suggest doing, to be on the safe side, is running a couple of quick updates against the database:
UPDATE revision SET rev_user = 0 WHERE rev_user = <current_user_id> UPDATE archive SET ar_user = 0 WHERE ar_user = <current_user_id>
What this will do is cause MediaWiki to treat the revisions as having been made anonymously when generating things like page histories, which should eliminate any problems caused by these routines attempting to check user details from other tables.
If the user has caused log entries, i.e. rows in the logging table, or uploaded images, then the situation becomes trickier, as you'll have to start mopping up all the rows everywhere and it could become a bit of a mess, so if the user's done anything other than edit, I would strongly recommend just blocking them indefinitely.
If the username is offensive or undesirable, then you could consider renaming it using the RenameUser extension.
I suppose the next user to register will inherit his user number, which means anything else in the database then is attributed to the new user, e.g., the deleted pages...
No; the next user to register will receive the next sequence value for users.user_id (which is not the same thing as the next unused number), and will not have those edits attributed to him.
Rob Church
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