Gaaah! I just upgraded to 3.8.14.1 and it made me update the database – And the 139,000+ users I had (9 of which were real) went from almost all being anonymous to almost all having no role so even the bulk erasers (which could only delete 1000 at a time anyway) couldn’t touch them … Which meant that I had to follow Pheriche’s advice and use SQL to fix it directly.
Since that was a few pages back, I’ll summarise:
# mysql –host=localhost –user=SECRETUSER –password=SECRETPASSWORD
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
mysql> use wpblogdb;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A
Database changed
mysql> DELETE FROM wp_users WHERE ID >10;
Query OK, 139201 rows affected (2.17 sec)
mysql> DELETE FROM wp_usermeta WHERE user_id NOT IN (SELECT ID FROM wp_users);
Query OK, 2259447 rows affected (1 min 5.54 sec)
mysql> select * from wp_users;
(just to check)
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> exit;
Bye
… The id>10 was worked out by the fact I only had 9 legitimate users, I deleted the last spammer by hand – I was leaving a little safety gap because I am odd that way.
Thanks Pheriche… Grrrr to whoever caused this!
