How do I block multiple users on MediaWiki?

Question

My wiki collected a lot of spam over the past few months, so I've blocked it to only registered users. Unfortunately I never turned off user registration. Is it possible to block a lot of user accounts at once, or should I just restart?

Answer 1

The quickest and least invasive way to prevent a big list of registered users from making modifications is probably to do a bulk password change for the unwelcome users.

Assuming you're running a Unix-like, and that the list of folks you want to keep is relatively low:

• Disable anonymous viewing and/or editing. (which it sounds like you've already done?)

• Dump a list of users from the database to a file.

eg., for MySQL:

mysql -p -u root -B wikidb -e 'select user_name from user;' | tee user.list

• Remove the users you want to keep from the user.list file.

• Use the MediaWiki password command-line tool to change passwords to something random.

eg.

cd [wiki-docroot]/maintenance/
while read wikiuser; do 
    echo $wikiuser; 
    php ./changePassword.php $wikiuser BOGUS%PASSblahblah77; 
done <user.list

Generating a different password for each user is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)