I'm trying to clean up a MediaWiki instance which has been subjected to spamming and vandalism for a period of time. The current status is that there are a large number of users which only created spam pages but typically not altered legitimate pages. And there is only < 10 users which I know are legitimate users and created a small number of legitimate pages. Abstractly, my idea of fixing the messy situation is to find the complete list of users that are not in that small set of legitimate users, and use RenameUser extension to rename them all to a Spammer user, and use Nuke extension to mass delete all pages it created. Any practical advice on how to proceed? Since there are hundreds of spammer users, how do I effectively rename them? It seems Renameuser extension does not support automated batch renaming of users by allowing users to be renamed with a list or file.
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2 Answers
I suggest installing Extension:BlockAndNuke to stop spam. It lets you instantly block users as well as nuke their contribs. A whitelist of legitimate users can be provided to be exempt from being shown on the list of nukable users. You'd whitelist your allowed users then use ctrl-a to select all and click the relevant button to block and nuke the user.
To delete all the spam pages, instead install extension DeleteBatch. Edit a script file from Special:AllPages of all the page names you want deleted. Load this into Special:DeleteBatch. Use PHPmyAdmin to mass delete the unwanted users.
