How To

Mass Delete Spam Subscribers

In WordPress

Every blog owner has a problem with spam users due to not keeping their WP core and plugins up to date and also not having spam counter measures installed to make it difficult for bots to auto register as users.

Why do bots auto register on all the blogs then can find? Well they get email addresses of some blogs that send out emails to thank new users and there are flaws that pop up occasionally that users may be able to exploit if a blog owner is lax on keeping their security holes plugged.

The key to deleting massive spam user counts is the top right hand screen options key allows an admin of a WP site to view ‘users’ in large blocks. First select subscribers (where all the spam users are found) then use the top right screen options button to select 100 or larger blocks of subscribers to be seen at one time.

Once you have a large block of subscribers not admins or author of CUSTOMERS selected, use the check box to select all these spam subscribers and then select bulk delete and apply. Bingo you can start to delete large amounts of spam subscribers in a few minutes.

The alternative is go 1 by 1 in the subscriber lists and delete only users that don’t comment and engage your site. It’s hard for easy busy blogs to get engagement with comments and such and most busy sites now allow users to just comment by using a valid social media account such as Facebook and Twitter.

If you only have 1 or a few blogs to maintain, just keep an eye on new subscribers and be aware most are FAKE.

Look for other articles on this site in regards to how to properly secure WP sites for such massive spam attacks.

Usually we don’t write free articles about security, we are WP Gurus and that’s a major part of why WP Owners hire us to tweak their sites.

But we do have some general articles about low level security that will stop most of this type of spam.

Just search for security and spam and the relevant articles will show in a search of our site.