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Add option to delete blocked spammer accounts instead of just blocking - #964

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Add option to delete blocked spammer accounts instead of just blocking#964
sdeibel wants to merge 1 commit into
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sdeibel:pr/11-delete-blocked-users

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@sdeibel

@sdeibel sdeibel commented Apr 9, 2026

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When a moderator blocks a spammer, the user account accumulates in the database with blocked status. Over time this creates thousands of dead accounts. This adds a DELETE_BLOCKED_USERS livesetting (default True) that deletes the user account entirely after content deletion, instead of just setting status to blocked.

When disabled, preserves the original set_status('b') behavior. The UI message says "deleted" or "blocked" accordingly.

When a moderator blocks a spammer, the user account accumulates in the
database with blocked status. Over time this creates thousands of dead
accounts. This adds a DELETE_BLOCKED_USERS livesetting (default True)
that deletes the user account entirely after content deletion, instead
of just setting status to blocked.

When disabled, preserves the original set_status('b') behavior. The UI
message says "deleted" or "blocked" accordingly.
@evgenyfadeev

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I think there might be some issues/improvements here:

  • you might mark users as spammers by mistake - so perhaps it would be better to create a job that deletes these users after some grace period so that you can restore mistakenly deleted accounts before they are gone permanently.
  • it may be worthwhile to store email addresses of blocked spammers - to reject re-registration with the same emails.
  • if you delete the content immediately, there will be no spam samples to train the filter on - ideally the spam samples would be taken into separate storage before deleting the posts (this could be implemented later though - some loss of these samples could be tolerated of course)

So I would rather have this implemented as a delayed action, not immediate and with some related improvements.

@sdeibel

sdeibel commented Apr 14, 2026

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I agree this probably needs more work, but the issue of thousands and thousands of spammer accounts has been a problem throughout for us, so I ended up going this far with it.

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2 participants