fake accounts

[kinnom]

I noticed that a lot of accounts (5731 to be exact) have 0 posts. a lot of them also have spam links in their website/ocuppation/interests and have been on the forums for less than 15 min.
will these get removed?

[ssilk]

I think most of them are banned forever. Reason: Webmasters don't can delete users. Many good reasons for that.

[aubergine18]

IMO they should be deleted - the birthday bar at bottom of main forum page is currently listing the following users, all of whom have similar age (20 or 21 today), all of whom are spam accounts:



[Kajanor] Links removed, I took care of them.

Maybe turn off the birthday bar?

[Kayanor]

Only 9 spam accounts?
Pffff...

[aubergine18]

now multiply by 365 and then the number of years this forum has existed for...

[kinnom]

and it's just a small fraction that has a listed birthday

[Koub]

I regularly ban any account that has an advertisement lonk, even with 0 posts, if it hasn't been already banned for spamming. And we moderators don't delete accounts, we just ban them.

[ssilk]

Well, cleaning this up is definitely not a task for moderators or master moderators (like me), it's a task for an admin with some knowledge about SQL.

[DaveMcW]

You should hide the birthdays if you aren't going to delete the bots.

[Kayanor]

You should hide the birthdays if you aren't going to delete the bots.

If these birthday spam bots are banned, they won't show up on the birthdays list any more.

[kinnom]

Well, cleaning this up is definitely not a task for moderators or master moderators (like me), it's a task for an admin with some knowledge about SQL.

wait, we have an admin?

[Deadly-Bagel]

Yeah but you generally don't want to go deleting a user directly from the database, because then you get things like any remaining posts or remnants try to link to that user but it no longer exists. You need to be sure you get -everything- which is why you generally have a stored proc or external saved query to do it so you don't miss anything.