Deleting users from the OJS database

[ctgraham]

You can combine your SQL query with the mergeUsers tool to remove the users in batch. One example is given here:

How do I combat SPAM?

There are a number of configuration steps you can take to combat SPAM and other forms of malicious registration activity on your site. CAPTCHA/ReCAPTCHA Configure a CAPTCHA and enable it for user registration, notifications and commenting. We strongly advise using Google’s ReCAPTCHA (https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/). (Older OJS 2 versions include a PHP captcha, but that has proven to be less secure than ReCaptcha.) If you are using OJS older than 2.4.8-3, you will not be able to use t…

If new spam registrations are ongoing, there are several plugins which can help:

Removing spam registrants

The mergeUsers tool would be most helpful, I think, in the case of a large number of users. In the other post, James describes using a PHP script to call the mergeUsers tool on a list of hundreds or thousands of usernames. ReCAPTCHA and email validation are setup in config.inc.php. In my personal experience, we found that spammers had completed both ReCAPTCHA and email validation, so our best response was using the plugins: