Thread

Hi all -

I just inherited a site that has nearly 400,000 “members” who were registered by spambots. This size of membership is taxing the db server and causing crashes. There may be some small portion of these members that are legit, but I’d wager quite a bit on most of them being no good. I purchased and installed Member Utilities and have spent some time moving members to the “blocked” group. When blocking them, the site records their email and IP and adds it to the blacklist. Here’s the thing - the number of members that the site has is too large. Keeping them on as “blocked” members doesn’t help our DB crashing issue 😊

so - thoughts on pruning this list? Should I delete my blocked users? I’d personally like to turn off membership, but it isn’t my choice. I’ve also taken other precautions against further registrations, but I’d like to help out our server first and foremost.

Thanks!

Hey julie p,

I am sorry to hear you are running into this problem.

The quickest way would probably be to back up your database and then use a query or phpMyAdmin to start deleting them in batches.

Not a fun tasks, but it sounds like you put some safeguards in place to stop this from happening again. So hopefully this is a one time “not fun” task.

Cheers,

Thanks, Shane. That’s what I’m thinking as well. We’re in a bit of a bad place here…

Hey Julie,

Sorry to hear that. Hopefully you can get through this tough part quickly.

Is there anything else I can help with?

Cheers,

not yet. I’ll post back here with additional questions if need be.

Hi julie,

Sounds good.

Just let me know if you need anything else.

Cheers,