WordPress MU

Greetings all,

When in the admin panel, wp-admin/wpmu-users.php, one can mark multiple checkboxes and perform two actions on them. Either delete, or mark as spammers. I have often used this function, but can someone tell me what it does? :P

I suspect it's supposed to set the "spam" table in wp_users to 1, but having marked around 50 users as spammers through that interface over the past few months, I today realised that none of them have been marked as spammers in that column in the database.

I just tested changing the password of one of my spammers and it is prevented from logging in and doing anything, but what's that table for then?

And where exactly is that marking saved?

I delete all blogs by spammers, removing everything, so it won't fill up my database. But I don't delete the users, so that they can't sign up again. So none of these users have blogs connected to them (at least not in wp_XX_* or in the wp_blogs table.

I've checked with a friend who also runs a MU site, and he has the same "issue". It's not exactly an issue that is a pressing matter, but that spam column would be need to have filled up when working with plugins :P Or at least somewhere else to look for that info.

I tend to just delete them, them change the password for the user. I also change the email address in the database, just for spite.

After about 45 days, I delete the orphaned user all together.

Another idea for controlling spammers is if you have a "niche" type site theme.

Like if your site was for bloggers the live in Spain, then you could block any other country from signing up with one of the IP-to-Country databases/classes available.

If someone is in a position to be able to do that, you'd be surprised at how quickly the splogs dwindle down. Unless you're in a country where a lot of them are coming from, of course.

Of course, changing the password would mean they would have to request a new one as well. Deleting the e-mail address, or chancing it in the database would make it so that they could sign up with it again, even though the chances are fairly slim as they seem to create and discard, but there's still a chance.

I don't like to delete orphaned blogs/users, because when sending out updates on e-mail I see that people once in a while log in and change something, update, or even manually delete their blogs. So, until my site reaches a fairly large userbase I won't be doing that.

My site is for norwegian people, or anyone who knows/understands norwegian. But blocking other countries is not an option, because there are many norwegian people around the world, and I want them to be users of my site :P

I have created a plugin that adds a page to my admin interface allowing me to manually approve sites. I store the id's of the approved users in a custom option, and select only from those blogs when listing recent posts on my main page. I made that this weekend because I was tired of waking up to my frontpage beeing filled with spam :P But as my site grows I realise that it will not scale well.

However, that was not the reason for posting this :P What I really was looking for was info on what the spam column in wp_users was for, and since it's not for saving info about who is a spammer or not, where is the list of spammers saved?

When counting the wp_users table, you don't get a sum of actual users, the spam column could allow for easy management of spammers, for instance to count actual non-spam users.

The code to do the actual updating was missing for a long time but it's in now if you're brave enough to svnup to trunk. I just merged from WordPress so I wouldn't recommend trying it on a production server just yet!