Since I opened DragonBlogger.com up to guest posting over the past few years and allowed users to register onto the site, hundreds upon hundreds of accounts have signed up but only a fraction of them actually ever submit a guest post. This is where when I keep going to my users tab to find subscribers or contributors to sort through them it became a pain to have to sort through so many non-used accounts.
The free WordPress plugin User Spam Remover completely solves the problem and you can find it in the WordPress plugin depot.
With User Spam Remover you simply install the plugin and set the threshold.
This is the # of days before the account will be removed if it had zero activity on the site, no comments, articles or even a login in 90 days and account is removed from your WordPress database. I typically lower this threshold to 60 days, if nobody logs in, updates their profile or submits a guest post within 60 days then they can create a new account.
This plugin will not remove any accounts that have previously published articles, it only cleans up SPAM accounts that have never contributed to your blog so you don’t have to worry about it removing former guest posters and leaving orphaned posts behind.
Makes sure you edit the User Spam Remover settings so that it logs everytime it cleans up users, this way if somebody was accidentally deleted you can recover if necessary.
It even creates a backup SQL file that you can just import into your MyPHPAdmin which will automatically restore the most recent deletion of users. This is a great just in case some accounts needed were deleted, but in using this plugin for months I have not had it delete any accounts that were needed or ever asked about.
If you need to cleanup spam user accounts in your WordPress blog as a result of allowing anyone to register to become a guest blogger, the User Spam Remover plugin is well worth it.
This is an original article from WP Cypher Copyright 2012
