Thursday, May 29, 2008

EPrints, SPAM & deleting users

We run an instance of EPrints 2.3 and noticed recently that it was getting lots of SPAM. Well, more specifically, that a lot of spammers had registered accounts on the system with meaningful usernames like "cunnilingus". Fortunately our self-archiving policy requires that user submissions are approved, but nevertheless the multitude of irrelevent accounts was irritating.

It was then that I discovered that EPrints doesn't have a command-line way to delete users. There's a create_user, but no remove_user. Not being one who is daunted by such problems, I set about writing one. It turned out to be quite simple.

Since I'm a firm believer of making the wheel available, here's what I came up with. YMMV and all that.

posted by guy at: 09:04 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link