Are Enhancements to the 'Dashboard' Available?

46HudsonPU

First, my apologies for posting this if there is already an area, thread, etc., on this, or if there is already a thread on this. I've attempted 'searching' for a couple of days now, however at present that feature is not functioning/functional here (?).

I am looking for enhanced GUI features in the Dashboard (possibly a 'plug-in' or app (?)). In particular, I am referring to 'USERS' maintenance area - Member account editing/culling. In particular, the 'mass' culling/deleting of inactive/invalid existing user accounts. If somehow (by each name/account) there was a 'check box', so that mass/bulk actions could be initiated on those accounts - all at one time, it would save hours or days of administration.

Background: Very recently, a forum which our classic car club frequented ('hung our hat' - so to speak) was put in danger of going away, due to acquisition of the hosting site (online classic car sales site) by a competitor who turned it into a 'pointer' to their own existing website. With their assistance, our car club is now hosting the 'car manufacturer' specific portion of that forum in our own area, on Vanilla 2 (a later version of the same software the previous host was running). The transition has been almost seamless, at least from my point of view.

Issue: There was a lot of spamming going-on with the forum during the previous host(s) administration (3rd sale of the main website in as many years). From what I can see, during all that time (going back as much as 10 years or so), the 'new member' application procedures were open, with no authentication required, etc.. This was an open invitation to those keying-in on locations to place their SPAM posts. There are in excess of 20,000 member accounts, with the majority of them being for no other purpose than to post SPAM-type traffic. In my estimation, there are less than 2000 legitimate forum members. From my point of view, it actually looks like there was some type of automated creation of massive amounts of member accounts (by multiple spammers), for no purpose other than the posting of SPAM.

Please advise -

Regards,

Rick C.

hgtonight

The fastest you can decline applicants via the GUI is to click on the Action column header to check all the boxes and then click decline at the bottom. It is fairly easy to remove all applicants using SQL.

If you are looking for a quick way to edit existing users, I suggest checking out Bulk Edit. /shameless plug

peregrine

If you are looking for a quick way to delete mass number or users based on criteria existing users, I suggest checking out Cleanser plugin as well

http://vanillaforums.org/addon/cleanser-plugin

as well as the the threads regarding dealing with spammers. removing applicants, registrationlogger, etc.

hgtonight

The fastest you can decline applicants via the GUI is to click on the Action column header to check all the boxes and then click decline at the bottom. It is fairly easy to remove all applicants using SQL.

If you are looking for a quick way to edit existing users, I suggest checking out Bulk Edit. /shameless plug

peregrine

If you are looking for a quick way to delete mass number or users based on criteria existing users, I suggest checking out Cleanser plugin as well

http://vanillaforums.org/addon/cleanser-plugin

as well as the the threads regarding dealing with spammers. removing applicants, registrationlogger, etc.

46HudsonPU

Sorry it has taken me so long to respond - Our club fairly small (less than 3000 members), and most of the work is all 'voluntary', nights, weekends or holidays.

Downloaded and placed both 'Cleanser' and 'Bulk Edit'. Enabled one at a time:

• Cleanser didn't 'do it' for me (the options I was looking-for were not there);
• Bulk Edit is much more basic, but seems to 'get the job done';

It's a lot better than where I was, but wish I had FTP access (someone else's prevue). More to say, but those probably need to go to the developer of the plug-in.