Take the tour ×  My wiki collected a lot of spam over the past
few months, so I've blocked it to only registered users.
Unfortunately I never turned off user registration. Is it
possible to block a lot of user accounts at once, or should I
just restart?  share|improve this question Do you mean delete
the user accounts? –  Shane Madden Jan 3 '12 at 23:41 That would
work for me. I think MediaWiki may philosophically be designed
to favor blocking over deletion. –  Chris Jan 4 '12 at 21:29 add
comment  2 Answers  The quickest and least invasive way to
prevent a big list of registered users from making modifications
is probably to do a bulk password change for the unwelcome
users.  Assuming you're running a Unix-like, and that the list
of folks you want to keep is relatively low:  eg., for MySQL:
mysql -p -u root -B wikidb -e 'select user_name from user;' |
tee user.list   • Remove the users you want to keep from the
user.list file.    • Use the MediaWiki password command-line
tool to change passwords to somethin