[Mediawiki-l] another, but valid, delete user question

[dKosopedia admin]

A couple of days ago I was also hit by this, or a similar, spambot.

I know the question of deleting users has been brought up before and  
nixed for valid db reasons. In this case, however, it's different.  
Looking at the user table on my wiki, a bot has been registering  
users for the past 6 months, every few minutes. The format of the  
usernames is consistent: in the beginning the usernames were 6  
characters ([a-zA-Z0-9]) with the first and fourth characters capital  
letters. For a while in July the usernames changed to eight  
characters, and then recently to 10 characters, with the first and  
sixth capital letters.

This started *exactly* six months to the day that the spam started  
(20070410 to 20071010).

Of the 17000 registered users on my site, over 10000 are spambot  
registrations. We monitor edits pretty closely (though obviously not  
registrations, which will change), so of those 10000 spambot users,  
no more than 20 have actually edited a page, all starting on Oct  
10th. (We caught it prett quickly.)

So it seems as if I should be able to feed my wiki a list of user and  
have it delete those users, if, as in this case, I am *absolutely*  
sure none of these users have edited pages.

So then, the question. If there's not a maintenance script somewhere  
that reads a user_name or user_id list and zaps them, then is there a  
danger in deleting those user records from the user table if I *know*  
they've made no edits?

thanks




On Oct 12, 2007, at 1:19 PM, 2007 at gmask.com wrote:

> Yea I don't want to stop anonymous users but it seems like that might
> be neccessary.. or it would be great if you could captcha new posts
> from either new users or unfamiliar IP's.
>
> -Adrian
>
>
> --- Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
>
>> Benjamin Horst wrote:
>>> I was experiencing the same types of "spam," or whatever it is.
>>>
>>> I started to enforce a captcha on every edit, which bothers me, but
>> stopped the junk. I hope there's a better solution out there!
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Ben
>>
>> We're having the same problem with our wikis. It seems that this
>> could
>> be solved if thereis a switch in MediaWiki that really mandates that
>> changes be made by registered users.
>>
>> We are planning to implement the other spam measures mentioned on
>> this list.
>>
>> Thanks to the advice from last week about how to stop DIV spam.
>>
>> Chuck
>>
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