bulk delete subscribers

I want to know the same thing. I’ve got over 8000 spam subscribers. Deleting them 20 at a time just doesn’t cut it.

Try showing more users (subscribers) by clicking the Screen Options at the top right of the users screen.

Thanks for the tip about number of users. Haven’t gone down less than 500 yet, but even with that, I’m getting “Request-URI Too Long. The requested URL’s length exceeds the capacity limit for this server.”

Side question – In primary widget area, I need the Meta so I can do the admin log in, and people can do an rss feed. But I see no way to eliminate the “Register” portion of the meta. So even though people can’t comment, they can still register. How do I get rid of the ability to register?

Your only other option really would most likely be to run an SQL query on the database to remove the subscribers. Not sure how familiar you are with SQL though….your host may have to assist you with this.

In regards to the widget, it would be easier to copy the URLs you need from the widget and then setup a custom menu and then use that custom menu in a widget.

Regards the registration in the widget, someone on a list I’m on solved that. Under General Settings, I had to take the checkmark out of “anyone can subscribe.

Regards SQL, I had found and tried this: https://tinyurl.com/kr2wrqa but it gave me an error similar to the one in the single comment (can’t remember exact message now).

I’m slowly but surely deleting them 400 at a time, so nevermind the SQL. Someone sure needs to make a plugin to bulk delete the users.

Well, a couple hours later, I’ve finished deleting subscribers 400 at a time, on all six blogs (more than 400 gives an error).

I’ve also taken the checkmark out of “Membership Anyone can register” on the General Settings and the checkmark for “Allow people to post comments on new articles” in the Discussion Settings.

Now, to see if that stops all the spam messages to my email, that have been going through Akismet.

Case closed for now.

I use the following SQL code for cleaning up bots:

-- Bot clean-up script

create temporary table wp_users_q_tmp as (select * from wp_users
  where id not in (select distinct user_id from wp_comments where user_id is not null)
  and user_registered < now() - interval 3 day);
insert into wp_users_q select * from wp_users_q_tmp;
delete from wp_users where id in (select id from wp_users_q_tmp);

This works, and also allows me to restore wrongly-deleted accounts by grabbing them from the wp_users_q table. (q == quarantine)

One side-effect however I notice with WordPress 3.9.1 is the user counts are wrong afterwards.

My user listing page shows:

All (16,581) |
Administrator (1) |
Subscriber (16,580)

yet, according to SQL:

mysql> select count(*) from wp_users;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|      150 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

So it’s keeping count somewhere else and I haven’t figured out how to update that count.