UESP Forums

Ever since the UESP Forums opened there have been spambots. For years their dead, banned accounts have just been sitting in the database, wasting space. Well no longer.

August 1st 2013 we will have the first ever Spambot Purge.

The criteria used to find bot accounts will be their Occupation. As many of you know, when a Moderator bans a bot they put either Spambot, Spamdroid, or Spámböt as their occupation. The script we will be using for the purge will look for those words in the Occupation slot in all user accounts and automatically delete them.

If you have any of those words, or anything close, in your Occupation slot, please remove it before August 1st. Failure to do so will result in your account being deleted.

Thank you,

Musicman & The Mod Squad

Will the script always be active, or just for that one day?

Question, what will be the fate of a UESP Spambot, who is very honest about what they are?

The script will be run once, not always on.

Spambots who are honest are still spambots and will be purged unless they change what their Occupation slot says for that day.

Well, I am out of a job...

I'm sure Musicman will take you on as his perslave assistant. I actually thought that spamdroids were deleted after being banned. :O It could be worth doing a monthly prune to avoid the numbers building up again.

+1...

Yeah, why weren't they deleted immediately? I mean you obviously couldn't go back and delete every spambot that you've ever banned, but it would have still been possible to delete spambots after you banned them as you went along. All water under the bridge now, though.

Holy smokes.

I'll be sure to do that, thanks for the warning.

Couldn't you modify the script so that it only deletes accounts with those terms in their occupation, if those account have also been banned? I don't think the current method poses any significant risk to members, but filtering for banned accounts as well would reduce that risk even more, yes?

Only Admins can delete accounts, and we had already been planning the purge, so there weren't too many reasons why we should start deleting before the purge. Doing a bi-yearly purge should be enough for the number of Spambots we get now.

@Moeboid: an excellent suggestion. I'll look into it.

Man, this is good, but a lot put Spambot in their occupation. Some people may not be on here right now, but could come back after August 1st with no account.

I read this, I've succumb to peer pressure once again. Falling victim to social influence.


Hipster.

I put in Spamboy for a bunch of them too.
It'd be a shame if the only ones that survvived would be the ones i got.

I'll actually be using wildcard characters like Spambo* and Spamdroi* and *pambo* just in case strange characters were used, or variations.

thank you!

So if someone is on vacation or something without forum access they have a chance to have their account deleted?

Yeah, but new account, PM mod to explain, get reinstated, new account deleted, no problem.

Yes, but it would be this way any time we decided to do this. I might change the date to middle of August or beginning of September if it seems like a lot of people are on vacation.

I'll also be checking people's accounts that I know are gone to make sure the word doesn't appear in their Occupation. If there is someone you know of, shoot me a PM.

Yeah. My occupation was changed by one of the moderators. I'd say any relatively active user would be fine.

Though could you not just delete every account with the specified occupation and who is also not in the confirmed users group. Seems a lot safer and a more eloquent solution. I really can't see you deleting any (previously) active users by accident that way.

I think you mean Confirmed Users, because everyone who registers is in the Registered Users group.

I'm looking into moeboid's suggestion about only deleting banned accounts as well.

The confirmed user filtering method seems risky to me. It's not that I don't have faith in Musicman's skills, it's just that minor mistakes in scripts can have unpredictable results. Which leads me to ask, will you be making a back up of all the current accounts before the purge just in case something goes wrong?

Yes, I will be making a backup.

And this:



Definitely means this:



Will work. Sorted.