Cthulhu
Administrator
- AKA
- Yop
DOOOM! 
So one of the things I'd like to do before moving to Xf is to clean up some shit accounts and the Junkyard, where we dump deleted posts / threads from spambots.
I've done a quick search in the user list and at the moment, we have 1414 users in the Spambot group (a special category of banned users that you have to manually select in the 'delete post as spam' flow - we can be pretty sure that these all tried to make a post, but were caught by the anti spam system and manually banned by staff) and 427 users in the 'banned' usergroup, who, looking at the usernames and e-mail addresses, are mostly spambots as well - although there are some duplicate accounts from banned users as well. 295 of those have 0 posts.
I propose the following:
* We clear out the Junkyard, go through it to check for non-spambot threads and move those to an archive junkyard section of sorts for future references, then hard delete the leftover spam threads.
* Recalculate post counts - that way, spambots who have had their posts deleted will show up as having 0 posts.
* Move banned users with 0 posts to the Spambot usergroup
* Nuke all users in the Spambot usergroup from orbit. Hard delete, etc.
This last step will also nuke some duplicate accounts from orbit (from some repeat undesireables); I won't grieve for those accounts being gone, but maybe we should put in the extra effort and sift those out first, IDK. I don't think those users would try to register with those same e-mail accounts again, and if they did we can just ban them again.
I did another search though, all accounts with 0 posts - there's 9165 of those, or like 85% of our userbase. A quick glance at the list shows a lot of bot accounts (with usernames like 76n9n072 and addamsmith and ADMINISTRATOR) and some legitimate users. 9088 of those have not been active / logged in at all this year. With those we can do a few things I think:
* Leave them, it'd suck to see our 'registered user' counter go down to about a thousand
* Sift through them and look for legitimate looking user accounts, removing the obvious bot accounts
* Nuke them all from orbit
Thoughts / opinions / feelings / n00dz?
So one of the things I'd like to do before moving to Xf is to clean up some shit accounts and the Junkyard, where we dump deleted posts / threads from spambots.
I've done a quick search in the user list and at the moment, we have 1414 users in the Spambot group (a special category of banned users that you have to manually select in the 'delete post as spam' flow - we can be pretty sure that these all tried to make a post, but were caught by the anti spam system and manually banned by staff) and 427 users in the 'banned' usergroup, who, looking at the usernames and e-mail addresses, are mostly spambots as well - although there are some duplicate accounts from banned users as well. 295 of those have 0 posts.
I propose the following:
* We clear out the Junkyard, go through it to check for non-spambot threads and move those to an archive junkyard section of sorts for future references, then hard delete the leftover spam threads.
* Recalculate post counts - that way, spambots who have had their posts deleted will show up as having 0 posts.
* Move banned users with 0 posts to the Spambot usergroup
* Nuke all users in the Spambot usergroup from orbit. Hard delete, etc.
This last step will also nuke some duplicate accounts from orbit (from some repeat undesireables); I won't grieve for those accounts being gone, but maybe we should put in the extra effort and sift those out first, IDK. I don't think those users would try to register with those same e-mail accounts again, and if they did we can just ban them again.
I did another search though, all accounts with 0 posts - there's 9165 of those, or like 85% of our userbase. A quick glance at the list shows a lot of bot accounts (with usernames like 76n9n072 and addamsmith and ADMINISTRATOR) and some legitimate users. 9088 of those have not been active / logged in at all this year. With those we can do a few things I think:
* Leave them, it'd suck to see our 'registered user' counter go down to about a thousand
* Sift through them and look for legitimate looking user accounts, removing the obvious bot accounts
* Nuke them all from orbit
Thoughts / opinions / feelings / n00dz?
.
