[Mediawiki-l] Clean up users?

[Anthony Lieuallen]

On 07/27/11 08:00, mediawiki-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> On 26/07/11 06:58, Anthony Lieuallen wrote:
>> SELECT 'all', count(0) FROM user
>> UNION
>> SELECT '0 edit', count(0) FROM user WHERE user_editcount = 0;
>>
>> all 	count(0)
>> all 	22749
>> 0 edit 	22288
>>
>> All but ~500 out of ~22,000 users on my wiki have never made a single
>> edit.  Is there a good way to clean out these junk records?  Is there an
>> extension that puts e.g. a captcha on the user register page (not just
>> edit)?
>
> Maybe some users only use the watchlist functionality?

Nope, they're spammers' failed accounts.

SELECT count( DISTINCT ( wl_user ) ) FROM watchlist;

count(distinct(wl_user))
3580

(And lots of those are for pages that don't exist on this wiki, and 
never did, including e.g. full URLs to facebook photos, 
"Www.farmville.com(bonus)", and in at least one case, many hundreds of 
lines of junk intended as page contents, each submitted individually as 
a watchlist page title, and two accounts with many thousands of invalid 
watched pages -- the wiki has only around 300 real pages.)