Bulk delete thousands of users

[Magda MunroParticipant]

That wordpress is primitive and limited is expected, but when you name a plug-in “bulk” wouldn’t it be natural to offer the possibility of deleting thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of users, simply be done a set number of users at a time without the administrator having to restart the process again and again?

With 100.000+ unwanted users or posts I have to click the same task 100+ times. Couldn’t the plug-in split up the job itself?

[SudarKeymaster]

Hello Magda,

The scheduler add-ons does exactly this.

The free version of the plugin allows you to delete posts manually and the paid add-ons allow you to automate this deletion by scheduling it.

[Magda MunroParticipant]

This actually doesn’t make sense as scheduling isn’t the same as “bulk”. I didn’t ask for scheduling, just the ability to delete many users manually. That should have been obvious.

I’m sure this product is good for some uses, but even before you answered I had all erroneous users deleted with another free product that was many times faster for that task.

Maybe you should reserve “Bulk” for your paid for versions then. This dissuades me from looking closer at your other products. If there are specific limitations you should be more open about them and not play with user expectation like I feel you do.

Thanks anyway.

[SudarKeymaster]

Well the reason this plugin is called ‘Bulk Delete’ is because this plugin allows you to delete posts/pages/uses/post meta etc in “BULK”. This is what the free plugin does.

If your server is able to handle the load then you don’t have to buy the add-ons at all. Even if you have thousands or millions of posts, the free plugin itself is perfectly capable of deleting all of them in a single go. The only limitation is your server’s resources. There is nothing in the plugin code that prevents the number of posts or users that can be deleted.

You buy the pro add-ons only when your server is not able to delete all of them in one go because of resource constraints and you want to delete them in batches by scheduling them.

Hope this clarifies the reason why I am calling it ‘Bulk’. Let me know if you still have any other questions.

[Magda MunroParticipant]

I want to make it clear I used another free product and deleted more than 130 000 users in a few minutes with minimal effort. I didn’t have to restart a complicated set up procedure time and time again as with your plug-in. So don’t give me the lacking resources part thank you.

The “Bulk” plug-in takes considerably more resources to do what the other plug-in does. Granted the “Bulk” delete plug-in is more versatile as it’s not focused on just one type of data and can likely be more useful if you need to delete various types of data.

I maintain you shouldn’t call a plug-in that can’t delete many, many posts in one go something including “Bulk” (or be setup to do that). I could accept it if limitations were made clear already in the naming — like if you add “lite” to the name of the free plug-in for instance — and it was clear which paid-for product lifted what limitations.

You have chosen to make this far too obscure. Maybe this is because you think about these things from your perspective rather than from the user’s.

I don’t have time to look trough 10+ plug-ins and then get into each and every little difference and detail of variations of one like yours. Please guide potential customers better and make these things MORE CLEAR. OK?

I feel you waste everybody’s time unnecessarily by failing to provide central information to the user for no valid reasons. You seem to have a useful product, but the info on how to use and navigate your different products is also part of the whole experience. This is very unfortunate.

Calling a product that fulfills the “Bulk” part for “scheduling” is just not very consumer friendly and can turn potential customers off. And it did this time.

[SudarKeymaster]

I want to make it clear I used another free product and deleted more than 130 000 users in a few minutes with minimal effort. I didn’t have to restart a complicated set up procedure time and time again as with your plug-in. So don’t give me the lacking resources part thank you.

The only way this could be achieved by this other plugin is by directly deleting the user rows from the user table using a custom SQL query without calling WordPress built-in function. This may be fine for quickly deleting data from the db, but this is going to leave lot of residual data in the db. For example user will have user meta in user meta table, roles, user options, transients, cache etc. Also if the user has some posts associated with them, then those posts will become orphaned in the db. My plugin calls WordPress built-in functions to delete users (or posts) and they remove all these additional information when you delete a user (or post). But these additional steps need additional server resources.

I don’t have time to look trough 10+ plug-ins and then get into each and every little difference and detail of variations of one like yours. Please guide potential customers better and make these things MORE CLEAR. OK?

Thanks for this honest feedback. I agree that the website and the add-on checkout process is quite complex right now. My plugin (and add-ons) provide very granular control and this has increased the complexity. I am currently working on making the website and the entire checkout process much simpler for users by introducing bundles and buy-all options etc and this feedback was very useful.

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