[Mediawiki-l] What is creating all these wierd users like "B79eb7"?

Thu Jun 23 20:35:03 UTC 2005

Ed W wrote;
> If I'm happy to edit the database can someone talk me through which 
> tables reference the user table and how safe it is to delete these if 
> they have never made any real edits to any content

I had a similar problem, at one point I had ~250 'real' users and ~250
'bot-fakes. Not sure what the 'bot created users were about, but they seemed
to have come in three waves with a decreasing number of fake users created
per wave. I excised all of the 'bot created users from my database about two
weeks ago and have had no new ones created since. I'll try and go over the
steps I took to excise the fakes, but please keep in mind that A) I didn't
write things down, so I might forget something, B) I know diddly about SQL,
C)I know diddly about MediaWiki, D) It is never, ever, ever a good idea to
follow my advice on anything. Oh, and make sure you back up your database
before doing anything. Maybe back it up twice. Or maybe three times. Just in
case.

1) Using phpMyAdmin I went into the user table and deleted all of the fake
users (hit browse, check the ones you want gone, hit delete).

2) Some users had signed up during and after the waves of bot created
phonies. I renumbered the user_ids of these users to make things consecutive
again, being careful to make a list of 'before' and 'after' numbers. 

3) I changed the user_id auto_increment to new highest user_id number +1.

4) I went into the user_rights table and deleted all entries past the new
highest user_id number.

5) I went into the watchlist and checked to see if there were any entries
with a user_id that had been changed and updated those (id est, if I had
changed user_id 428 to 250 in the user table, I changed it in watchlist if
there was an entry for that user_id).

6) Two of the users with a changed user_id number had done editing on the
wiki, so I went through and searched tables that seemed likely (ignoring
tables like brokenlinks, categorylinks, hitcounter, and others that seemed
unlikely to have user entries or data in them) for those user_ids, changing
them where they appeared to the updated user_id.

While something of a PITA, it was easier to do than I expected. The 'bot
created users are gone from my database and everything seems to be running
fine.

I hope that's of some help.

						Myria