Bulk delete members waiting for manual approval?

[Daniel Wolf]

Hi there,

there was a slight mis-configuration of my forum and now more than 4.000 members are waiting for their manual approval by the admin. It is a wild mixture of about 75 percent spam-accounts (most likely) and 25 percent real users. And I tend to delete all of them and request for re-registration. It was clearly my fault, but now I need to handle this situation in some way.

What might be the best way to get rid of these accounts without clicking on them one by one?

 

best regards,
  Dany

[Marc Stridgen]

You can prune members if there is some criteria to search for them with. You would go to the cog icon in the Admin CP on the members list, search for the members you wish to remove, then use the prune link provided.

Note, I would highly advise on making a full backup before performing this action

[Daniel Wolf]

Hi Marc,

thank you for the answer.  I have noticed the cog. But how can I search for members awaiting approval?

I cannot search for that flag and I also cannot combine fields like "date joined = date of last activity" (that would be close enough for this case).

Edited December 13, 2021 by Daniel Wolf

[Jim M]

The validating tab should hold anyone who is awaiting manual validation. However, this may require further filtering if there are other validating members in there.

[Daniel Wolf]

This is true - the validating tab contains a list of 169 pages, a little more than 4.000 members.
As mentioned in my first post, I am looking for a solution that does not require me to handle them one by one.

[Jim M]

53 minutes ago, Daniel Wolf said:

This is true - the validating tab contains a list of 169 pages, a little more than 4.000 members.
As mentioned in my first post, I am looking for a solution that does not require me to handle them one by one.

You would use the advanced search to find a criteria which will fit your needs and then sort by clicking the validating tab to get those that fit it and are validating. You can then use the prune feature in the blue bar to prune all found.

[Daniel Wolf]

Actually I could not find a clear criteria in that search-form.

But actually SQL helped me to create a criterium. First, I identified all accounts in the approval-queue using the members bitmask and then I updated the post-counter for these members to an unique value:

update `core_members` set member_posts = 998877 where ((members_bitoptions & 1073741824) > 0) AND ((joined - last_activity) < 100) AND (member_posts = 0)

Now it was easy to prune them. Actually the background-task is still running, but we are on a good way.

[Jim M]

Glad to hear you found a solution to your problem. Please be advised I moved this to Community Support as it is not recommended or supported to run custom manual queries like this against your database. Keeping a backup of the change prior is recommended as that would be our solution to any problems resorting from this manual query.