actually I found it here! great tool. https://github.com/ewinslow/elgg-bulk_user_admin

Actually the plugin doesn't do much. Just shows which e-mail domains make up your database. In terms of mass deleting I don't think that is functioning in this plugin. oh well.

@Satheesh I'll check it out! Looks promising. thanks!

@Sath don't want it to delete non spam members though.

As far i know and in my openion there is no meaning in keeping inactive members who never logins or check the site at least once in two years?

I thought I had it bad with the spammers on my site. Out of about 500 blog entries I viewed, 1 actually had a link to somebody selling a product. I used his contact form to tell him I was sending him a bill for the costs to remove his spam from my site.

Thanks for the response here folks, I'll try the same as you rx'd here.

Rich Brunelle

I wrote a script to delete all accounts registered with an email in the form "foo+bar@hotmail.com", because humans don't use that pattern. I found more than 3000 in my db. Then, running the script, and not seeing it ending, I got suspicious about  what was happening. Turns out that delete_entity takes at least one minute to complete on any given GUID. 

Given that poor performance, I can't imagine how long it will take to remove all identified spammer accounts, and I'm looking  for an alternate, faster way to kill the bastards. I'll look into the above mentioned plugins for faster code, but I concur with thefonz: removing that amount of accounts is waaaaay too slow.

I think when a user is deleted it also has to delete all their content too.  So sometimes if they have a lot of content (spam) it fails (and you have to try again) or timeouts at least when deleting from the regular menu anyway.

ftsfan is correct, it's not taking a minute to delete the user entity, it's also deleting all content that user has ever created.

Yes indeed, but many spammers only have the time to create a blog article or so, I'd like to do some precise benchmark, but it seems to me that the entity cache is slowing down the process. When deleting a lot of entities, I guess it's better to bypass the cache and rebuild it once at the end.