[Forum] Prune User problem

[MrIWS]

Good morning. Im running 4.2.5 and I am getting 100's of spam registrations and want to prune/move users.

I am selecting the proper criteria, and the list of users I want to delete show up on the next screen. selecting delete and pressing go and I keep getting these errors:

Invalid Action Specified

No users matched your query.

Now the weird thing is, I've tried this over and over with different criteria and it worked once, why wouldnt it work again?

[Wayne Luke]

You need to select users in the list provided. They should each have a checkbox. At the top of the page, there should be a checkbox that when selected, selects them all. Once you have selected the users to delete, you can delete them.

This is to prevent accidental deletion of users that you wish to keep.

[MrIWS]

Thank you for the response.

It actually defaults to that checkbox, where everyone is already checked.

I uncheck it and check it again, still get that same error message.

[BirdOPrey5]

This is likely from trying to delete too many users at once. The way it works is it creates a URL with the userid of every user to be deleted, userid=2001&userid=2002&userid=2034... and if you have lots of users it literally gets longer than the web server is designed to handle. They all just ignore characters after some max length, usually around 5000 characters in my experience, though every server can be different.

You need to use the tools (such as join date, last activity, or the like) to delete these users in smaller batches. The "sweet spot" is usually somewhere between 500 and 1000 users max at a time.

Unfortunately if you haven't been deleting users the entire time this could still require a number of mouse clicks to delete tens of thousands (or more) old users.

[MrIWS]

Thank you for the response.

It actually defaults to that checkbox, where everyone is already checked.

I uncheck it and check it again, still get that same error message.

This seemed to do the trick, thanks for your help!