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I've picked up an old EE 1.6 site that has 58k spam member accounts. Anybody got a safe way to delete them all without going through every paginated screen in the CMS? It's on a live server but I suppose I could edit the SQL to change pagination.

I'd rather do it directly in myqsql though I think, but I want to make sure no table relationships are broken.

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    Are you deleting all the members or just specific ones?
    – nonprofit_tech
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 11:53
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    Indeed - is there a specific criteria you are using to determine who is a spam account and who is not?
    – Derek Hogue
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 13:37
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    I just had to do this the other day. Can't remember the exact queries I used, but here is what I did: 1. delete all members in the Pending member group 2. delete all members whose last_visit date wasn't set 3. Find common spammy email domains and then delete from exp_members, exp_member_homepage, exp_member_data where the email address contains that spammy domain. But, I didn't know about the member account pruning, so you may want to start there.
    – Trevor Davis
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 19:50
  • Basically ALL members in the group 'Members' can be binned as we don't use that group at all.
    – Russ Back
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 13:50

3 Answers 3

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If the members you are deleting have something simple in common (e.g. They never logged-in ) then you can use the member clean up tools - these might work for you.

Go CP Home › Admin › Utilities › Data Pruning › Membership Account Pruning

Obviously back-up first before even looking at this and YMMV but for EE 1.6 the data pruning might be handy.

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  • This is what I would recommend.
    – CreateSean
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 21:27
  • Good shout. I'll give that a go and update the question with the result
    – Russ Back
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 14:10
  • It works. Sadly the script times out a lot but if you do it in reasonably sized batches it works OK. Thanks guys
    – Russ Back
    Commented Feb 27, 2013 at 15:43
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The easiest way to delete 1000s of members is to use the following SQL after backing up your database:

DELETE
FROM `exp_members`
WHERE `group_id` =x

x is the member group number you want to delete members from.

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  • Thanks fmz I removed about 300K users from my site with that SQL command. I backed up before tho. DB was 140MB compressed. Is now just 5mb compressed,
    – Warry
    Commented Sep 6, 2013 at 8:52
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I would think your best bet is backing up the DB in production, writing a script to test the removal on your local machine, performing the update on your local machine, importing the changes back to the DB.

You might have to do a site-wide content freeze for a few hours, but that's pretty standard in situations like this.

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