[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE[/youtube]
For several months now I have been putting up with a plethora of new user registrations on this site. Most of them have not been from real people, however, but rather spam registrations sent out by “bots” that scan the blogosphere and select web addresses to be their targets. Once they find one, they deluge that web site with multiple new user registrations that, in turn, clutter up the blogger’s inbox with emails saying that a new user has been registered.
It has been very frustrating because, not only does it mean that you have to keep cleaning up your inbox but also that, at some stage, you have to go into the administration panel and prune out all the spurious registrations. So, on Friday I decided that I’d better get to it. As always, however, nothing is as easy at it should be. The way that WordPress arranges new users is in alphabetical order, either ascending or descending, those are the only choices. Since the hundreds of spam users had all manner of names, pruning them out by searching for spurious-looking names and the pruning them one at a time was going to take forever.
But, WordPress is very clever. Not only is it a very well-written piece of software but it has attracted thousands of software experts who have written hundreds and hundreds of add-ins (called “plugins”) to the programme that enables users to do all sorts of things with it that its writers never envisaged when they first wrote it. Sure enough, a quick search through the Plugins directory found a plugin that will add and extra field to the Users table, that of “date joined”. This was exactly what I needed since I knew that this has been happening to me since about late September.
So, I installed the plugin and activated it and suddenly I had a users list that showed me what date each user had joined the site. Arranging this list in descending order of date brought all the new ones to the top of the list and enabled me to do bulk deletes of about 70 at a time till I had reduced the list by about 600 users.
First part of the job done. BUT, how to stop the flow of spam user registrations altogether so that I wouldn’t have to waste time going through that exercise again? That was the next challenge. Fortunately, there are also several plugins that carry out that function as well. I chose one that interrogates every new user registrations and compares it to 90 criteria that are common to spam registrations. Sounds good. So, I installed and activated it and, guess what? For yesterday and today the number of spam registrations has dropped to zero, not one single one cluttering up my inbox or my user database. Victory, at least for now.
Back to school tomorrow after a busy weekend with commentating at Goulburn speedway last night and then a thorough wash, vacuum and detail of the two cars (also grossly overdue). That is all. Catch you tomorrow.