Mass rename users (or similar) to deal with spammers

[Jesse Stratford]

Hi there,

I've done a bit of a search on this topic and haven't found any relevant threads, so I'm posting a new one.

We've accumulated about 900 spammers in the course of the last few years. More recently some of them are signing up with usernames which include very inappropriate words. While we can ban these users, their names still appear in the user list, and we'd rather not have this as the case.

I've figure out how to mass-delete basically every user in the Banned user category, but my concern is that such users will then simply be able to register again. My assumption here is that when I ban user X, his email address is therefore blacklisted from future registrations. Thus, by deleting user X's banned record, I'm opening the door for him to register again and begin spamming once more.

If the above is indeed true, can anyone suggest a way that I can keep my banned users banned, but change their usernames to remove obscenities? I'd happily rename them all BannedUser1, BannedUser2, etc. but that's going to take forever to do manually.

Appreciate any assistance,

Cheers

Jesse