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Asweome, thanks for that. I also just realised that the way Google's recaptcha accounts work, you can't change account type (ie, from "not a robot" to "invisible"), but you can create a new account... so that's what I've done, and I think it's working now. 🙂

Hi. It turns out my forum has been using our own reCAPTCHA account, and this does not support Invisible reCAPTCHA. Which means every time someone tries to register, Google says no. (So that explains why no new members have been registering lately!) I'd like to revert back to the IPS default reCaptcha keys, but I don't know how to find them. Can someone tell me what these are? Cheers.

Figured I'd post this script in a new topic, so people don't have to wade through this one to find it. Get the Bulk Spammer Removal Tool here:

I've been working on a script that runs through a pre-identified list of members, and flags them as spammers. I'm delighted to say that after spending way too many hours on this (seriously, it probably would have been quicker to delete them manually!) I have something that works. I have now cleaned up my forum. I've deleted 387,162 spam posts, banned ~700 spammers, and reduced my database size by 3.2 Gb. Best of all, this was all done using IPS functions, so it shouldn't cause any nasty database discrepancies. I'm feeling quite pleased with myself about all this. 😄 I'll post instructions and my script here, and hopefully it helps someone else in the future.

Thanks Miss_B. That looks like a useful app for people who have already flagged their spammers, but it seems to work after the spammers have been flagged. In my case, that would mean going through the forums individually identifying hundreds of spammers - which would defeat the purpose of the bulk action your app offers. 🙂

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Knowing what NOT to do is also helpful. Cheers Marc. I like the sound of marking them as spammers, and letting IPS take care of the cleanup. The only problem I have with this is the word "individually". 😄 There's about 1000 spam members, so anything that requires deleting one by one is not an option. Let me reframe my question... When I flag a user as a spammer through the ACP, what happens? It seems to load /admin/?app=core&module=members&controller=members&do=spam&id=XXXX&status=1&csrfKey=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Presumably this runs a function in the IPS core... how I can tap into this? Can I create a standalone PHP script that loads all my spammer user IDs into an array, loops through them, and either runs the Flag Spammer function, or just loads this URL? Thanks in advance. @wegorz23 - Cleantalk sounds great, but it seems like it might stop new spammers, but won't clean up my current ones?

Yeah, weird issues is exactly what I was afraid of... hence my hesitancy! The ACP members group pruning technique is what I was talking about here: Apologies, I called it "purge", not "prune" (I mean, I was pretty close!). But as mentioned, the problem here is that prune only removes the members, not the posts. So I'll still be left with with thousands of spam posts, just from guest users. Unless there's some way I can follow up the member pruning with a clean-out of guest posts? 🤔

Hey guys, After I went AWOL from my forum for a few years, my site was completely overrun with spammers. Now I’m trying to clean it up, and already I’ve deleted hundreds of thousands of spam posts (literally – half a dozen spammers had ~50,000 posts each!) 😬 Anyway, I’m now cleaning up the long tail of ~1000 spammers who’ve made 50 posts or less. I’ve identified these on a spreadsheet, and am now ready to build my SQL query to do some mass culling. My question is… what’s the best way to tackle this? I can think of two possibilities. 1) Replicate the “Flag as spammer” function If I could use SQL to flag as a spammer, I could then use the built-in IPS functions to remove the spammers and their posts, so I can be sure it’s done cleanly and properly. Problem is, I can’t see how to flag as spammer with a simple SQL command. I was hoping there’d be a “is_spammer” field in a table somewhere, but haven’t found that yet. Can anyone tell me how function this works? 2) Manually delete the spammers using SQL In this case I’d delete spammers from the ips_core_members table, and their posts from ips_forum_posts and ips_forums_topics. This is easy, but it doesn’t feel like the “proper” way. I’d be nervous about other records not being updated and causing database inconsistencies. I had originally thought I’d assign my spammers to a new member group, then search and Purge through the ACP. Unfortunately, Purge seem to delete a member, but not their content. So that’s not a solution. Can anyone advise me on the best approach here? Thanks in advance.