Spam Everywhere

I’m an admin for a discussion forum covering the Concept2 indoor rower, and one of my jobs is to clear up forum spam. We tend to get very little because of a simple spam blocker one of the members came up with (it stops users posting links until they’ve made several posts, and most spammers only try a single post). That doesn’t stop the spammers signing up, however, and if nothing else they hope to get some page rank from the memberlist that the forum shows by default (which is why we turn that feature off).

Because of a recent upgrade we’ve temporarily lost the spam blocking feature (ok, ok, I’ve forgotten the needed password and need someone from the US to wake up so I can get it), and got the memberlist back. A quick count shows that we have around 1,700 users who’ve made a legitimate post (which is pretty good), but an additional 12,500 who look like spammers. Depressing, to say the least, so I’m now looking for a script to allow mass delete. Whilst most users are from the USA, I think I’ll start with all the people from the mythical land of Tramadol.