After the domains are blacklisted, the accounts that have already made it through are unaffected and can still be used. I want to ask if anyone knows of a way to bulk destroy (delete user + all of their content), suspend or silence users based on their registration email domain? In my case this would allow deleting/disabling hundreds of thousands of accounts that used the catchall domain technique to register.

Was this migrated data? Deleting that many accounts is going to be very, very painful – unless they all have almost no content.

You can do it from the rails console, but it does sound like it could be very messy.

@codinghorror - It’s not migrated data. I don’t mind painful and slow as the alternative of allowing the accounts to stay is probably worse :hot_face: For amounts of content, it’s a mix, some have none (usually the spammers intend to use these accounts later), some have minimal, some have heaps. @pfaffman Great! Do you know how? Haha :pray:

Have you given a thought to anonymizing the users?

@fzngagan That might be a solid solution. Know if there a way to do this in bulk?

Yes. It can be done from the rails console. But the question is, on what criteria do you want to anonymize them?

@fzngagan Great! The criteria would be, all emails that use a specific domain in their registration email. E.g. example@blacklisted.com, example2@blacklisted.com

In rails console, type these commands and see if they give expected results(replace you email id pattern with ‘@gmail.com’) idlist = UserEmail.where("email like '%@gmail.com'").pluck(:user_id) users = User.find(idlist) then (proceed with caution) system_user = Discourse.system_user users.each do |user| UserAnonymizer.new(user, system_user).make_anonymous end I’m not an expert in performance related stuff, so I don’t know exactly what would happen if number of users is big.

@fzngagan Wow nice, thanks heaps! :slight_smile: I really appreciate it. I’ll make sure everything is recently backed up before giving this a shot. Quick question, do you know if bulk silencing the users (forever) using this technique is possible?

Email Blacklist - Bulk Delete/Disable Question

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fzngagan (Faizaan Gagan) September 23, 2019, 7:27am 11

Yes. Rails console can do mostly everything that can be done from code.

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