Mass Member Delete.. 9,000 members

How can I delete mass amount of members at one time? I had a spam problem and had over 9,000 spam members sign up.. I have fixed the problem so that no more spam members can sign up, however I am stuck with 9,000 members I need to remove. In the dashboard I can only delete 80 at a time. 

Is there a simple way to do this?

If you can find a common ground among the spammer accounts, then you could use a sql query to search on that common ground and remove the accounts.  However, you have to be sure that common ground is not shared with legitimate accounts.

ok this i have to ask,, did you just leave your site neglected for a while then come back to 9 thousand spam accounts,, surely you didnt go to bed one night to wake up to 9000 spam accounts in the morning?

ok this i have to ask,, did you just leave your site neglected for a while then come back to 9 thousand spam accounts,, surely you didnt go to bed one night to wake up to 9000 spam accounts in the morning?

The spam accounts just kept coming and coming, the 9000 happened over a about a month.. During that month I was trying to figure how to stop them. I finally stopped them, so now I just need to clean up the members..

We would like to just delete all of the current members, 99.9% are spam and the other 1% is just our own company employees test accounts.. So we can just delete alll members and start over.. What is the easiest way to do this?

 i had a similar thing happen to me when i got to 600 members and the best backup i had was 300.. so wiping the whole thing was gonna cost me half my members.. but i made a choice to wipe the whole data base cause deleting a mass amount of accounts just to save less than 200 real ones,, i say shoot an email out tonight to all members that they will have to recreate in 3 days or something,, and dump them all

Yea I think that is the best plan... How would I do a mass dump of all members?

 ask newton or pranshank .. i never upgraded any of my sites past 7.09 so i dont want to miss lead you.. but those are the only 2 here i trust 1000 percent with my site and rest knowing it will all work at the end of such things.

not saying people like deano and hl and people like that are not as good but everytime i have tried to hire them for work they are always too busy.. but michael and shanky have saved me more times then i can count and i can vouch for them.. so mail one of those 2 and they are good people and im sure will get back with you on the best way to wipe what you have right now far as members

More than 42,000 spammer accounts I did a fresh dolphin installation to remove them.  I had about 12,000 real members all of them deleted as well..

 did you atleast save the email accounts ?? so you can resend the link to the real members you lost?

if i had to lose 12000 real members i would call my mother an cry i think

This is how I would do it.  You can run an sql query and dump all rows except your account.  Another way would be to export your account from the profile table; using phpMyAdmin or some similar database tool.  Then dump the profile table and then import your account back in.  You can not just dump the whole table because you will dump your admin account as well.  Now if these accounts have created spam blog posts etc. you can easily clean up the blog posts by uninstalling the blog module and then installing it again, it will wipe out the table for blog posts.  The same for articles etc.  If you have not set up extra forum boards, then the same for forums.  Otherwise for forums you would want to just remove the topics as you would have to recreate your boards.

Wow, wish you had asked about this in the forum. We might could have helped with an sql query to help keep from losing the real members.

This MySQL query will delete 500 spammer profiles (that have links in their profile):

DELETE FROM `Profiles` WHERE DescriptionMe LIKE '%http://%' LIMIT 500;

Repeat the query multiple times. Use higher/lower limit depending on how long does it take. Too high could temporary freeze mysql. 

 
That will not purge any information that may have posted.

Deleting directly from the database is not recommended.

Just delete 80 at a time.  It'll keep you amused for a while, but for now it's the best option you have.  Are these confirmed members, or did you turn off email confirmation?

This post was from 8 months ago, they've probably got them all deleted by now.

Opps. My bad. I replied to a post to someone who bumped a 8 month old topic with bad advice.

The worst kind of bump!

That was their first post and the account is 5  years old.. they've obviously been waiting for just the right time to bump an old post.

I don't know.... he might still be working on it.

 Does this delete everything belong to that profile or just the profile and their posted stuff remain?

I have about 47,000 spam accounts and it froze every time I delete 200 profiles at once manually. 

 How on earth do you get 47,000 spam accounts?  Where were you when this was happening?

I once had a request to help someone that had purchased an old Dolphin site.  The site had no spam protection and was open; auto approving/activating new accounts. It was being hit so bad by the bots that I would see several hundred spam accounts added per day.  I quickly shut the site to new accounts.  The sad part was the the new owner wanted me to pick out the "good" accounts out of some hundred thousand profiles.  I tried to explained that I doubt if anyone with a real account was still visiting that site.

The only answer I'll give regarding how to delete thousands of spam accounts, is just to delete the entire worthless site.  If someone cares so little about a site that they would let this happen in the first place, why should anyone jump in and offer them help to clear up a problem that is a result of their own neglect.

 I went to Vietnam where I had no internet connection and computers.

My host at one point must help me fix the spam so that it wouldn't bring their shared server down (thanks to Zarconia hosting). 

I have about 5000 real members on the site now and I don't want to delete all the contents, mods, that I spent 1000s of dollars on.

If it doesn't work then I may as well hire a Vietnamese newbie 2$/hour to clean it up manually.  The fucking bots did not go through the registration and confirmation process I believe, they just did some kind of SQL injection to insert the accounts, posts etc... automatically. Because I use Captcha with manually verification method (where you have to enter a certain word to show you're a human).

 Remember you get what you pay for.

 yup, I don't care about the money but I'm afraid the lazy fuck(s) will just delete the whole list of users instead of looking for spam accounts.

Since the numbers are so large, you may have to delete a few "real" members in order to do a simpler bulk deletion of "fake" members.  As someone already suggested... look for a characteristic common to all (or almost all) of your "real" members and use it to remove those that don't have it.  For example, if the vast majority of your "real" members have an address in California, then you could do a db UPDATE query to "Deactivate" the profiles for all memberships with addresses outside California. 

Then place a note on your public homepage stating you've purged your site of SPAM accounts (without stating how you did it) and anyone may contact you to request their account be reactivated... assuming 99.9% of spammers won't care enough to read the note *and* send a request.