Can I mass-delete or mass-ban members?

[Sam Mustafa]

I've caught a spam bot that has created about 300 memberships on my site. About half are from the same host, the others are all different hosts, but always a .ru suffix.

I've set up new security questions for new members, and I thought I'd banned the host, but I'm still seeing all of those member names on my member list. So my questions are:

1) When I search for members by host and get those long lists of member names, how do I "select all" to mass-delete or mass-ban them?

2) How do I ban all members with the same email address suffix?  Such as:  @blahblah.ru.

3) This may seem draconian, but is there a way to deny access to anybody with a .ru suffix?  I have nothing against Russians personally, but I have no real Russian members, just spammers.

[Bob Perry of Web Presence Consulting]

I've caught a spam bot that has created about 300 memberships on my site. About half are from the same host, the others are all different hosts, but always a .ru suffix.

I've set up new security questions for new members, and I thought I'd banned the host, but I'm still seeing all of those member names on my member list. So my questions are:

1) When I search for members by host and get those long lists of member names, how do I "select all" to mass-delete or mass-ban them?

2) How do I ban all members with the same email address suffix?  Such as:  @blahblah.ru.

3) This may seem draconian, but is there a way to deny access to anybody with a .ru suffix?  I have nothing against Russians personally, but I have no real Russian members, just spammers.

I'm not very knowledgeable about banning by email addresses, but here are my thoughts about how to handle spammers, I like to leave their accounts intact, because if you delete that account it only frees up that email address to be used again to create another account, like all of us, these spammers (or at least the majority of them, have a limited number of addresses to use for that purpose... so? what do you do? you ban them by the IP address which allows you to use wild card characters, thus if you ban a range by using wild card characters you effectively catch almost all of the spammers accounts. you'll need to research where to put the wild cards but you have to consider that a few legitimate users may be included if you get it wrong

[Sam Mustafa]

you ban them by the IP address

Unfortunately I tried that last night and the result was that everybody (including me) was banned from the site. I was advised on this thread:

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=549963.0

...never to ban by IP address again!

[Bob Perry of Web Presence Consulting]

Yes, as I said in my original statement, do your research and learn how IP addresses work and how they are structured, you normally would leave the first two sets of numbers alone and only use wild cards on the last two or one...

[GL700Wing]

You could implement one or more of the spam blocking mods (some of which are compatible with each other): Stop Prevention Mods

I use httpBL, Stop Spammer and Misc Anti Spam together on my forum.

In addition I have set up lots of different questions in the "Admin -> Security and Moderation -> Anti-Spam" section that are specific to my forum (I have disabled Captcha and new members must answer three questions when registering).

Since implementing the combination of the mods and the Anti-Spam questions more than three years ago I've only had a handful of spammers join and these have been real people rather than bots.

[Kindred]

Banning by ip is pointless and wasted on spammers... the spammers can just get a new IP address in seconds.