Managing unwanted users
I'm a total beginner. A developer set up elgg and joomla for me recently and i've been learning how to use the system. The system is intended for members of a local club - they need to validate by email in the usual way AND be authorised by an admin in order to join. however unknown to me the setup allows anyone to join. I have discovered literally thousands of unknown users using the system and creating enormous data flows. so my questions are:
1 what is the best way to close the group ie to require admin permission before becoming a member.
2 how do I do a mass delete of all accounts except my own admin account
3 how to clean up the database if any of their stuff is left behind
thanks for any help and advice - please make it 'easy to understand' :)
- Matt Beckett@Beck24
Matt Beckett - 0 likes
- Team Webgalli@webgalli
Team Webgalli - 0 likes
- iionly@iionly
iionly - 0 likes
You must log in to post replies.If that's your goal, then delete the database and start over.
Start with a new install and use this plugin for admin moderation http://community.elgg.org/plugins/875414/1.0/user-validation-by-admin-for-18x
For mass deletion of accounts you can also try this plugin: https://github.com/brettp/Bulk-User-Admin. It will allow you to delete users also based on the email domains they used for registration, so you should be able to delete a lot of users quite fast. It also allows to delete several users selected at once.
If you delete a user account all the stuff they added (e.g. blogs) will get removed, too.
For setting up a website for a closed community you can surely start by using the plugin suggested by Team Webgalli. Depending on the number of members to expect for the site you can also disable user registration completely (advanced settings). Maybe it would be easier to create the accounts manually (as admin you can create new accounts), if there are not too many to be created.
Independent from the account registration I would suggest to also allow content to be viewed by logged-in users only (advanced settings). This might at least reduce the number of spam accounts created a bit. If you can't disable registration of new accounts, you should install a few anti-spam plugin (Spam Filter, Spam Throttle, Honeypot), to reduce the spam accounts as best as possible.