XF 1.5 Batch Update Users showing very few users

[Brendan Burgess]

Question 1
I want to delete all our banned users.

When I go into Batch Update Users, there are only 68 banned users.

But when I search , I find 1,400 or so.

What might I be doing wrong?

Question 2
We have a lot of users who have never asked a question. I propose deleting all users who have never asked a question and who have not visited in the past 6 months.

Is there any downside to that?



Brendan

 

[Martok]

Question 1
I want to delete all our banned users.

When I go into Batch Update Users, there are only 68 banned users.

But when I search , I find 1,400 or so.

What might I be doing wrong?

When using Batch Update, are you only using this criteria (and no other)?



If so and the results don't appear to be what you expect, can you identify any users that don't appear in the list that you think are banned and check to see if the are in ACP > Users > Banned Users. Are they there? If not, maybe they aren't banned but have been added to a Banned User Group (which isn't an actual ban on a user).

Question 2
We have a lot of users who have never asked a question. I propose deleting all users who have never asked a question and who have not visited in the past 6 months.

Is there any downside to that?



Brendan

There shouldn't really be a downside. I have a policy that any users who register and don't post within 2 months will be deleted. I do delete conversations and remove any likes (from the user screen in the actions dropdown) - it's not really necessary but I do it for tidiness. If you have lots of users you might not want to do this.

 

[Brendan Burgess]

When using Batch Update, are you only using this criteria (and no other)?

Martok

Brilliant. That is it exactly.

I had been using the Primary User Group


When I unticked everything else, except Banned State , it works.

Thanks

Brendan

 

[Brendan Burgess]

There shouldn't really be a downside. I have a policy that any users who register and don't post within 2 months will be deleted. I do delete conversations and remove any likes (from the user screen in the actions dropdown) - it's not really necessary but I do it for tidiness.

Thanks for this. I will do it gradually - deleting the oldest first.

Brendan

 

[Martok]

Martok

Brilliant. That is it exactly.

I had been using the Primary User Group

View attachment 176145
When I unticked everything else, except Banned State , it works.

Thanks

Brendan

As I mentioned, Banned Users is a user group and doesn't make a user banned, only the Ban user option does this. Glad that's sorted it for you.

Please note that you should have the Registered User Group as the Primary User Group for everyone on the forum. All other user groups should be secondary. XenForo was designed to work in this way with members being in multiple user groups. In case this isn't clear, there's a guide for this:

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/implementing-permissions-across-multiple-user-groups.358/

 

[Mr Lucky]

When I unticked everything else, except Banned State , it works.

Sounds like you migrated from vBulletin or some other forum platform that banned users by moving them to a banned group.

xenforo permissions system requires everyone to be in registered users and all other usergroups as secondary, only adding or removing specific permssions of the reistered.

Banned usergroup is not required unless you want to style them differently, but all members you want banned should be marked as such, ie you have to actually ban them. In that case I would do a batch update search for all users (not banned) in that usergroup and then ban them (using batch update)

Question 2
We have a lot of users who have never asked a question. I propose deleting all users who have never asked a question and who have not visited in the past 6 months.

If you have forums that are viewable by members only, it's quite possible you may lose some traffic as those members may well have been visiting but not posting.

 

[Brendan Burgess]

Please note that you should have the Registered User Group as the Primary User Group

Wow! I did not know that. I must study that in detail, because I find the permissions so confusing.

Brendan

 

[Brendan Burgess]

If you have forums that are viewable by members only, i

No, all our forums except two small private forums are public.

We don't allow private conversations until people have at least 5 posts , so they won't be affected either.

Brendan

 

[Bill Stuntz]

Does deleting banned users allow the spammers to re-register?

 

[Brendan Burgess]

Yes, it would be one of the drawbacks.

But as the spammers realise that there is no point in registering on my website, they probably won't bother.

Brendan