During upgrade site now shows 10,000 spam accounts

During upgrade site now shows 10,000 spam accounts

by Leticia Dark-rose -
Number of replies: 6

Hi all,

I have been involved in testing our Moodle site which has been upgraded to 3.1.

I have noticed that suddenly the site has 10, 000 new user accounts which were not imported or created by myself or the application admin. I have also noticed guest activity being tracked in the course statistics reports however no guest access in activated or allowed on this site.

From memory the only setting changed prior to the additional accounts was activating the Enable Gravatar (enablegravatar) function under User Policies.

Any assistance would be very much appreciated....our enrolments are now out and i need to know how to prevent this occurring again. Please images below of spam accounts and guest activity in the statistic reports.

Leticia


Attachment Gravatar_on-off.png
Attachment tool_.png
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Leticia Dark-rose

Re: During upgrade site now shows 10,000 spam accounts

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

These are not spam accounts but test accounts. It seems someone added a test course from Site administration > Development> Make test course and these users were added along with the test course(s) and activities.

Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: During upgrade site now shows 10,000 spam accounts

by Leticia Dark-rose -

phew!

That's wonderful news. Will these disappear when it is deleted?

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Leticia Dark-rose

Re: During upgrade site now shows 10,000 spam accounts

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers

If you mean, will the 10,000  user accounts be deleted when you delete the test course, then no, they won't.

They are ordinary users. You will need to mass delete them with the Bulk user actions tool. Since their email addresses are always of the form tool_generator_#####@example.com you will be able to filter them easily. 

Tip: you probably will not be able to delete that many users at once without getting a database timeout error. So you can try to delete them in groups of 500 or 1,000 at a time to avoid that.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Leticia Dark-rose

Re: During upgrade site now shows 10,000 spam accounts

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers

So if you neither you nor your application admin created this large test course, who did?

Go to Site admin > Report > Logs, choose the name of the test course to see its history and who created it.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Randy Thornton

Re: During upgrade site now shows 10,000 spam accounts

by Leticia Dark-rose -

Thanks Randy got it....someone told porkies

I appreciate your help. smile

Average of ratings: -