I have had my bbpress forums “hidden” meaning that I disabled the menu linking to my forums, so that nobody can see them. However I just discovered that I have over 500 “users” all of which are spam.

How do I stop this from happening? My forums are not active right now but I haven’t been able to figure out how to “turn them off”.

Another question is, how do I delete all these spam users? The control panel only seems to allow me to delete them one at a time…? This will take days for me to delete them.

[@chrishajer Participant 14 years, 9 months ago]

First, you can use the Human Test plugin to prevent or at least minimize spammer logins.

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/human-test/

Second, not linking to the forum URL is not really hiding it. Spammers know to look for URLs like /forum, /forums, /bbpress, etc. No surprise there.

If the forums are not active, why not just drop all the tables and reinstall?

If they’re not active but have existing data, then you will need some SQL to drop all the users and all their posts and related meta info, if any. Did the spammers post anything, or just register? Or can you drop the tables and reinstall?

[@johnhiler Member 14 years, 9 months ago]

There’s a nice Mass Delete Users plugin that lets you batch delete members:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/mass-delete-users/

I’ve used it before, and it’s great!

Just make sure to backup your data first, just to be on the safe side.

I think there are also plugins you can install to disable registration. Let me know if you are interested, and I can try to track one down!

[@johnhiler Member 14 years, 9 months ago]

Here’s a plugin to disable registration:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/howto-disable-registration

[@fifthhouse Member 14 years, 9 months ago]

Thanks everyone! I should be able to work this out with these plugins and guidelines. Cheers