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

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(a)gmask.com wrote: