Changing country manually for multiple members

How can I change country manually for multiple members in the database? I'd like to get rid of those Aland Islands, for example; and editing it one by one seems more like a task for penal labour. :)

haven't you searched the forum for spam solutions?

Sure I did. But many a real member complains about how the joining process is difficult and often even a calendar for the birthday proves to be an enormous obstacle. It's not only for Aland Islands (where for example, Los Angeles clearly points to the US as a country), practically every single member who registered via Facebook has Afghanistan as a country and as far as I remember, only one managed to edit the profile after the joining. Also, I'd need this query to edit perhaps tags field in the profile edit. Something along the lines of inserting into an empty tag field a username of the member, though this one's a bit more complicated by the look of it, and it's not essential at the moment... or maybe creating everyone with avatar a featured member as well... if I knew how to do these queries, life'd be much more simple... :)

In my opinion, the first step would be to stop letting FaceSucks run the world; in other words, stop allowing "registered via Facebook."  People often wonder about security problems when they are letting the security problems happen.  However, if you have default fields, remove them so that a member has to select a country or the bozo checker yells at them.  If you really want the country to match properly, then set the country based on their IP address; of course if you are allowing proxy connections it could still be wrong.  On my site I don't sweat it if a member wants to list from a country that is not the actual country.  Sometimes people will be living in one country; so their IP is from that country, but want to show their native country.

As for the queries, use a database tool such as phpMyAdmin or database workbench from Oracle.  You just do an update on the database replacing "Aland Islands" on the field in the table with whatever you wish.

 This is very easy to do, it is in your admin section.

http://yoursite.com/administration/preValues.php?list=Country

move "United States" to the top using the "arrows" on the right, its tedious but it is what I do.

You can remove the countries you don't want listed on the join form here as well.

You can also "pre select" a country via the 

• Builders
• Profiles Fields
• Select "Country" field
• Advanced Tab "default value," enter what your default country is here

p.s.

You can "pre fill" just about all of your join form with default data, I do and it makes joins so much faster and less tedious.

Thanks for input. :)

It didn't occur to me to change the wretched Aland Islands into something else. :) Also using the preset values as a tooltip. :)

Newton, yes I'll do the presetting for the Fb registration - it's Afghanistan there and by the way, the US IS a preset country by default, I think all the way down from the original install - still, some folks choose the first from the list - or, the default setting does not work, that's what came to my mind right now. A moment of enlightment! :)

However, I need to edit the country for those who already joined with Afghanistan and I don't want to do it one by one, rather through a query in phpmyadmin. Any help there available?

 That would be better left to someone more versed with phpMyAdmin, Deano, Prashank25, and a couple others are very good with simple commands to clean up databases.