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PunBB Forums → PunBB 1.2 discussion → Do you delete users?
If you have a growing forum, and more than 50% of users are clearly bots. After installing a spam fighter and a captchabox (yeah, that's my case 
), would you delete them and clean your forum? Or you just let them in your lists? (With their ugly meaningless nicknames, and a relatively big number of users that doesn't reflect the reality of your modest forum)
And among the users, which ones can I be sure about them being bots, apart from the ones that already posted spam? Those weird e-mail addresses are enough to tell?
The -12 timezone is a clear sign?
Not necesarily, although it's likely: I would say send out a mass email asking people to post and then prune a week later (for people with 0 posts)
You said elswhere the pruning is:
It allows you to remove topics that have not been posted in within a certain number of days.
But still..what's that? How so not posted in?
Pruning is for old topics. You want to use the User Management plugin to delete users: I used prune as a general term 
I didn't use any plugin, I just deleted over 20 manually ^^.
You can do that too, but the user management plugin allows you to delete large numbers of users easily: I deleted several thousand for a forum recently
I have seen that pluging on punres, but I didn't install it.
My 20 don't seem to be much compared to the total of 160 
. There are still so many of the remaining users that are bots, and it kind of bothers me to have them there. I'll deal with that later.
Thanks for being around .
here in the downloads section of PunBB.org is the user management plugin Smartys is referring to. i just used it about 3 weeks ago and pruned 1900 0 post users in under 2 seconds. one of my top favorite plugins for sure.
Thanks Dr.Jeckyl (Mr Hide?), I'll get it too.
And among the users, which ones can I be sure about them being bots, apart from the ones that already posted spam? Those weird e-mail addresses are enough to tell?
The -12 timezone is a clear sign?
What I do, is that I delete all users that don't log in after they signed up. I usually wait a couple of days, and if they haven't logged in by then, I delete them.
To see if they have logged in after signing up, go to «Administration», «Users», and type a asterisk (*) in the field «Username» and hit enter. This will give you a list of all your users, and the ones marked in bold text have not signed in after signing up. Of course, this is only useful if you require email-verification.
Also the -12 timezone clearly indicate (for most forums) that it is a spambot.
What i really would like to see in future versions of PunBB, is that the users don't show up in the user list until they log in for the first time. That would really solve the problem with spambots, I think.
To see if they have logged in after signing up, go to «Administration», «Users», and type a asterisk (*) in the field «Username» and hit enter. This will give you a list of all your users, and the ones marked in bold text have not signed in after signing up. Of course, this is only useful if you require email-verification..
That is one fine trick! I got many that has the status "not verified", but not all of them are spambots. Some bots log in directly after registration, but don't get to post.
It's good to see how do others deal with this. I just was wondering if other members would find it weird to notice the number of users go down.
I delete regularly every account still in group 32000 (not verified) if they are over 1 week old
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