Please help me on some critical matter

[sukasarkar]

Hello.. I am sukanta.. I have installed this SMF forum on my site..It is very nice..But i am facing some problem.. I have installed this 1 month ago.. I have 2500 members..thats a good thing..But i think they all are spammer.. They are just posting topics with their sites advertisement. But i need fresh members.. So Should i Ban those users or allow them to do this?.. I don't like spammer.. So i want to remove them.. What should i do? Please please help me..My site is www. infotilla. com  and forum installed on  forum .infotilla .com  ..  please visit my forum and give me some suggestion....

[JohnS]

Whether to leave that spamming there or not is your choice, certainly I would remove it.

You will have quite a bit of work given you have 2500 users most of whom will be spammers.

It is probably easier just to remove that installation and put back a fresh new one.
Genuine users will be put off by all that spamming and I suspect that there will be some very unsuitable posts in there.

You should at least chose EMail activation in the Members Settings area and Admin Approval if you want more control.
You should also activate the verification questions in the anti-spam area as this prevents most robots registering, a few will get through but you will just have to keep a lookout for them. There are other anti-spam add ins if things get bad.

The issue now is that these robots know where your forum is, if you decide to reinstall a new version then put it in a different sub directory, they will find it eventually but no reason to make things easy for them.

If you did not want to do a reninstall, then you can delete the current users in batches making sure you get thier posts removed at the same time, or you will have to go through all the posts and delete them one by one. You must still improve your anti spam on the forum though as detailed above. There is not much point in banning them as the registrations tend to come from different places every time. Personally I look for IP ranges that are generating the most registration attempts and then block those IP ranges in the control panel of the server rather than in SMF.