Topic on Project:Support desk

Over the last year my website was raided by spambots. They have created hundereds of accounts that I wish to delete for good. There is a UserMerge extension that can merge all of the accounts into one, but that seems to be a very inefficient way of dealing with it, since there are hundereds of spambots. Is there a way to delete a lot of users at once?

Extension:BlockAndNuke can mass block spam accounts and delete all contributions made by those spam accounts, in just two clicks.

Also, Extension:Checkuser may be helpful, which can find the underlying IP and the interface can provide options to block a bundle of accounts from the same IP or an IP range.

I see that BlockAndNuke only works for recent accounts. Unfortunatelly it does not really work for me, as the users are dated back to 2017. Also, all contribution has been deleted already by other extensions, I only want to delete the accounts.

Oh I did not read the question carefully...

I see that BlockAndNuke extension can be integrated with Extension:UserMerge to merge blocked accounts. But I do not know how it works exactly

“

Integration with Extension:UserMerge If you have Extension:UserMerge installed, this blocked user's accounts will be merged with the user specified in $wgBaNSpamUser which, by default, is "Spammer". If you want this to work you will need to install code from here for UserMerge as the main branch of UserMerge does not have the necessary hooks in it.

”

I tried to use it. Unfortunately, seems like this patch is long outdated. It needs to apply changes to the file UserMerge.php, but in UserMerge extension for MW1.32 there is no such file. As I remember, older version (namely 1.16 that I used) did use the starting file of extensions in that format, but no more. So its effectively useless :c

diff --git a/UserMerge.php b/UserMerge.php

index d0c20d2..7247024 100644

--- a/UserMerge.php

+++ b/UserMerge.php

@@ -45,6 +45,7 @@

I have a similar problem: see Deleting multiple users.

I answered in your thread, luckily for you there is a simple solution for your case.