All WordPress websites are targeted via spammers to try and get backlinks to their sites and potentially to infect those sites with dodgy content – some of which is definitely not appropriate for a church!
Assign Possible Dodgy Users to Spam (Likely)
We have a manually created User role called “Spam (Likely)”. Into this if we come across Users that potentially are Spam, we are to select those users and change their role from “Subscriber” to “Spam (Likely)”.
To do this, login to the Administration portal of the site, then click on Users on the left. You then click on Assign Roles for a specific user like this:
Alternatively we can multi selecting users and at the top of the screen change roles.
Deletion of Spam Users
Once we have people who have been assigned to the Spam (Likely) role, we need someone who knows the church membership to go through all the users who are then in that User role and delete those that are spam. This can only be done by an administrator. Preferably, the person who does the deletion should not be the person who changes the role.
To do this, login to the Administration portal of the site, click on Users. Then click on the link at the top of the User list for “Spam (Likely)”. This will have a number beside it that represents all the people of that User role.
We then need to review each person and delete them. To do this simply go down the list and put a tick in the box for each person (carefully)!
Then when you have a page full, go to the top of the screen and under Bulk Actions, select Delete and then click Apply. All those users will then be deleted (and cannot be restored).
Change the Incorrectly Classified Users back to Subscriber
Any users left should have their role changed back to Subscriber.