Idea: automatically delete users flagged by "Approve Suspect Users" setting

I’ve enabled “approve suspect users” and this has been a godsend. I get a lot of bots who sign up without reading any posts and all of them are spam. Is there a way to just automatically reject new users who don’t read any posts? 100% of those users are spam in my experience. Right now I have to go and manually reject perhaps 50 users a week.

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Hi Reg! That’s a great feature suggestion. Have you noticed that it’s now possible to bulk select and delete users from the admin user list? That at least makes it quicker and easier to delete them. You can select them individually or select one and then shift-click on one further down to select multiple at once.

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@tobiaseigen As far as I can tell, I can’t filter the admin user list by users who haven’t read any posts. If I could, that would definitely improve things. I still hold out hope for the “Approve Suspect Users” to change to a dropdown, with one option being “Automatically Reject”. Really, I just reject all users who haven’t read any posts and I don’t see the advantage in this work when no human judgment is utilized. Most of them are escort services and crytpo scams, and people who have hired unscrupulous SEO companies who think that spamming forums will improve their search results.

Thanks for noticing my old post. I had given up hope. :slight_smile:

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Have you tried sorting by “Read time”? That should let you quickly see and select a list of all the users who haven’t spent any time reading.

Your suggestion is interesting but I am a bit concerned about automatic deletion of users just because they completed their profile and haven’t read yet. The users flagged thanks to this setting are hidden, so any harm is already taken care of immediately.

I think the answer here really is to revisit this setting and improve it. Now that we have AI spam filtering, it should be possible to filter user profiles for spam. Just disabling or deleting everybody who completes their profile feels like an overly blunt response to me.

You’re welcome and sorry! :grimacing: I came across it when researching the “Approve suspect users” setting, which is not well documented yet here on meta.

I appreciate your response and your attention. I will investigate sorting by read time when I get home. My guess is that it will work well for me.

Regarding your hesitation to reject users based on not reading posts, I just want to note that I have been using this feature for some time now and 100% of those users have been spam. I hope you at least consider auto rejection as a configurable option.

AI spam filtering would be amazing.

I really appreciate your product.

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That’s incredible that on your site 100% of the users flagged by this setting are spam. Wow! So maybe this setting is working as designed and we don’t need to touch it.

Given your experience, maybe you’d like to speak to our product team about moderation?

Right, the problem isn’t with the feature. The feature is correctly identifying spam users.

The problem is in my workload caused by the way this feature was implemented. Rather than just giving me some way of instantly rejecting the spammers, it is forcing me to go one by one through my notifications and reject each user manually. Roughly five clicks per user. Call it 250 unnecessary clicks per week. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s inefficient.

I just did a sort by read time and that helped. It’s better than going through them one at a time but there’s still a lot of clicking and it would still be much better if the system gave me the option to reject these users automatically.

I appreciate your time and help.

I hear you.

Does sorting by read time, clicking the top one and then ctrl-clicking the bottom one, then selecting bulk delete work for you? Alot fewer than 250 clicks!