Re: Cleaned out spam accounts from Patchwork / Django.

[Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh@gotplt.org>]

On 05/06/20 02:36, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> FYI. We had 36,000+ django accounts because of spammers creating
> patchwork accounts over the years, but then not doing anything
> with them.
> 
> I have purged the accounts with "is_active==false" which means
> they created accounts and then never verified them with the
> post-registration confirmation.
> 
> We are down to 261 *real* accounts.

Awesome, thanks for doing this!

> The reason I did this is that two people have already reached
> out to me to "unlink" old emails from their patchwork account.
> 
> When you "unlink" an email you have to confirm the unlinking by
> responding from that email. This is dumb because you often have
> lost control of that old email by leaving your previous employer
> so most often the "unlink" has to be done by the admin interface
> and to do that you have to click a dropdown box populated with
> all user names and select "----------" to unlink the patchwork
> person from the associated django account (Home>Patcwork>People).
> 
> On Firefox clicking a dropdown populated with 36,000+ entries
> completely hangs firefox forever.
> 
> If spammers get to be a problem we'll need a cron job to purge
> is_active==false accounts that are older than a certain date
> and do it with python to interface to django to do the admin
> action.
> 
> I'm not sure how to script this, but I just wanted to tell you
> what I just did, why, and that it's a problem.

I've filed an issue now to have this supported from manage.py:

https://github.com/getpatchwork/patchwork/issues/362

Siddhesh