Our message board (up for a couple years now) probably has a few hundred legitimate users. Yet the total number of users is over 47,000. Mostly these non-legit users, perhaps robot-created, never post, and the only problem the cause is that Google occasionally flags their user data pages for improper content, as they’ll include promotion of a gambling website in the signature field.

What, if anything, should I do about this? I suppose I could go into the database and delete all users that have never posted in one fell swoop. Would that be advisable? (Apart from admin users, there is no reason for someone to register unless they want to post on our message board.) What else? Am I doing something wrong that permits or invites these user registrations?

https://fairmark.com/forum/

[@robin-w Moderator 3 years, 11 months ago]

In essence you are allowing anyone to register in

dashboard>settings>general

one of the scourges of the internet is the race to get a site listed on page 1 of google – the sites google ranking. One of the parameters google (and other search engines) use is how many times a site is found listed on other websites. There are loads of ‘companies’ that offer to raise your google ranking, and one of the ways they try and do this is to register and add the website to their profile on WordPress sites that allow registration. Sites that allow anyone to register get known, and yes robots are then used to register.

yes, you can go in and delete the bogus users, but you’d need to be satisfied that they have not posted, as otherwise any forum posts by this user might cause the site to error.

you might be better to set the ‘screen options’ in dashboard>users>edit users to 999, and bulk delete a thousand at a time, you can then attribute content or delete it.

for future you might do better to add an approval to registration – there are several – I’ve not used any, as I have a manual registration process, but this one should do what you want

WP Approve User

[@creekdweller Participant 3 years, 11 months ago]

Thanks, Robin. While I’m not expert in manipulating databases, it should be possible to create a command that selects all users for whom the number of posts is zero and deletes then en masse. As it happens, the command for deleting users isn’t functioning properly on my website: I can delete one at a time, but if I select multiple users and hit delete I get an error message. Until I get that fixed, I can’t use the normal process for user deletions to solve this problem.

[@robin-w Moderator 3 years, 11 months ago]

yes, if you’re ok with mysql, then yes.

you’d need to look at usermeta where wp__bbp_topic_count and wp__bbp_reply_count forthat user are nil

[@creekdweller Participant 3 years, 11 months ago]

Thanks for that heads-up.