Imported PHPBB3 boards, discovered hoard of spam accounts. Easy fast removal process?
 

Hey,

I've setup vBulletin, updated to 4.17 and discovered I have thousands of false accounts imported. Is there a plugion or method to search all users, and remove spammers?

Also, I have almost two thousand accounts prefixed with:

imported_

How can I bulk merge these?

Any help is appreciated

Im looking forward to the response to this. I have the same problem :)

Make sure you have a database backup before running this as i'm no database guru, in phpmyadmin run this:
delete from user where username='imported_%';

You will have to add the prefix if you use one in the tables like vb_user and vb_username, the % is a wildcard so it's looking to delete anything in the username column that has imported_ at the beginning of the name.

Hope it helps.

Will that delete the imported_<NAME> accounts?

I'd like to merge them, as it is the imported_ accounts that have post data

it WILL delete them, like i said i'm no guru but i guess what you'll want is to delete the imported_ from every username then use an UPDATE query for the table to merge the usernames.

OK, that seems reasonable, I spose I look something up.

Also, is there a method to bulk remove spam accounts? I have vbStopForumSpam, and was wondering if there is a "serach and kill" ability in either this or another product?

Unfortunately not, you would need to know the usergroup or email address or username, it's fair to say that you could use vbulletins built in prune users to prune say all accounts older than x days with zero posts.

I'll see what i can find on the UPDATE USER query :)

--------------- Added [DATE]1319340413[/DATE] at [TIME]1319340413[/TIME] ---------------

Did you use Impex to import your database to vbulletin?, if not and you still have the database it might be wise to go back to the backup you made before adding all your new data and then use impex to import them.

Hey Simon,

I ended up deleting the boards and starting from scratch with fresh boards, and a fresh import. No more merging of users, no need for sql. Thankyou for your help though.

I'll play around with the prune feature to try to ditch this hoard of false accounts.

However, do these accounts actually pose a threat? They came from bots plaguing a phpbb3 board, and the new boards are on a subdomain. Can they wake up and cause havok?

I'll remove them, but I'd rather not delay going online by another day while I remove the filthy filthy accounts.

I don't recommend doing this, since it would leave other issues on the board (I once accidentally emptied the forum users table...the weirdness that caused is hard to describe). The vB user prune function would probably clean up any loose ends from said accounts.

Possibly, but the bots would need to reset their passwords first, just like the users would need to. Who knows if they're intelligent enough to do so :p.