Topic on Project:Support desk

Hi, I have a tiny personal wiki. I kept Account Creation off because I was the only person using it.

Yesterday I turned Account Creation on to let a bona fide colleague make an account and come edit.

This morning I looked at Recent Changes to see what they did and was shocked to find over a hundred new users and pages. 127 bogus new users in fact, over the course of 20 hours and 39 minutes (that's about 1 new user every 10 minutes).

At a glance, it looks like each one made one new page. All on ridiculous stuff like "Good Webpage Design Planning", "Ten Wonderful Led linear Light Hacks", "Hello I am a Danish female", User pages, Online Slot Tournaments ... you name it.

As soon as I saw what was happening, I turned off Account Creation a couple of hours ago. However there continue to be new pages added by the bogus accounts after I turned off Account Creation.

With over a hundred bogus accounts and pages, it would be a super hassle to individually revoke rights and delete users and pages.

Is there some way to do it en masse? Like a page that has a checklist, "delete this user and all edits and pages made by them?" Then I could just checkmark it for the 127 accounts. It would be great to simply remove all that b.s. from my logs and pages so it remains just "my" site when I look back on historical edit logs, etc.

When I google on this, the results are oriented toward non-tiny sites trying to keep spam on their site to a minimum. I don't see anything oriented toward "how to kill a lot of users and their pages all at once".

A quick reply will be appreciated. :-)

P.S. I am using MW v. 1.35.1. I did a backup of my wiki folders shortly before turning on account creation. I guess I could restore that but I'm not sure I'd do it right. Plus I'd have to tiptoe all around the new bona fide edits made by my colleague (on maybe 8 pages). Not impossible, but a hassle plus quite embarrassing to me for this person who kindly volunteered to help me with some pages. "No wait - stop editing, stop editing! Make your account again! Make all your changes again!", lol

Extension:Nuke.

That looks enticing but it only applies to deleting pages, not users themselves. Also it doesn't remove the pages from history.

Still it's much better than doing it all manually. I thank you for that.

There's also more info on Manual:Combating spam and Manual:Combating vandalism. The latter has advice on clean-up.

I've had this. I used Manual:removeUnusedAccounts.php to get rid of the spam accounts, and Extension:ConfirmEdit with QuestyCaptcha to prevent new ones.