Email Blacklist - Bulk Delete/Disable Question

Installation
1

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.

2

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

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3

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

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4

@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:

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5

Have you given a thought to anonymizing the users?

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6

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

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7

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

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8

@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

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9

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.

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10

@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?

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11

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

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