User Killer
Tired of removing robot user registrations from your site? User Killer was written for you. This simple plugin can remove two kinds of user:
* Registered but not activated after seven days (configurable).
* Activated but never logged in after 60 days (also configurable).
User killer is a low overhead plugin, it runs just once every 24 hours (also configurable, of course).
It also uses the core user functions, so that other user plugins are triggered. This allows other extensions to clean up their user data and keeps your site clean.
This plugin saves me incredible amounts of time. My site has over 3000+ users and at least 20 new users a day (recently). During my routine admin duties I find myself removing half of them for never activating their accounts (spam/bots). This plugin automatically does this for me keeping my site clean without an extra work on my behalf...THANK YOU!
User Killer fills in an important role for Joomla administrators and simplifies the user management to a few simple clicks to install the extension. Great job as usual!
So I installed a testsite, just to get a feeling for the plugin. Fair enough, its easy to handle... to easy for my taste. Let´s have a look at the most critical setting, the "Exclude User Names". Ok, I do know my "special" users, but how many don´t?
In my case I have a user "Msg-Bot", which sends Newsletters. This user would have been deleted, as he NEVER completed activation and NEVER logged in, he is ID 1, so he doesn´t have to. And whats about the CBE-Userlist? Ok, the CBE running on this system isn´t the actual version for Joomla! 1.5, but I could imagine, that this didn´t change. Just deleting jos_users and jos_core_acl_aro would get CBE out of sync and would produce a long list of dead profiles (in my case about 2.500). Thinking about an Joomsocial site brings up the same question.
I find it astonishing, that there is no rollback funktion, there is no manuall control possibility before users get deleted. I really do not recommend this plugin as a "fire and forget" extension, mostly if you have something more than just a Joomla! vanilla setup. In my case, I did it manually and tried to contact you at your forum but did not received an activation link until now.
Because the extension is a plugin, it's extremely limited in what it can do. Backup/rollback is not an option. Obviously the documentation can benefit from some dire warnings about this being irreversible. We'll add some.
The plugin loads each user and calls the delete method. This is well documented. The delete method causes Joomla to fire the appropriate events. If an extension that extends the user information leaves a dead profile, then it's because that extension has failed to respond to the event. We have no control over that.
The fact that User Killer is a plugin also means that there's no user interface. There is no way to offer any manual control.
I have looked at the logs and discovered that when registering on our site, you put data into a field that was not visible. As a result, you were classified as a spammer. Since many fake registrations seem to be done by live people, we lied to you about receiving an activation message and ignored your registration. In a typical day we receive upwards of 80 fake user registrations. The hidden field gets about 80% of them with a very low rate of false positives (about 6 per year). We're sorry about that. If you want, please try again but be a little more careful.
Configuring the plugin was even easyer, But once i enabled it my site slowed down for about 30 mins due to the fact the plugin took up all my servers resources while it purged out over 11000! of my 30000+ users who had never logged thank you for this fantastic little tool solved all my problems, with un-used spare accounts on the site.
You might have found that acceptable, but we don't. We have just released version 1.1.0. This version includes a limit to the number of users killed per request. If any users are killed, the next run is scheduled after a short interval (both parameters configurable).
This will prevent adverse server impact on the first run.
Thanks for your review!
