No access: Throwing the baby [my account] out with the bath water [users table]

  • I did something really bad.

    After many complaints re the performance of my blog, I just spent eight hours cleaning up files, re-sizing photos, adding CDS function, etc.

    Then I noticed I had 50,000+ users listed, obvious residents from spam city. I tried a “bulk delete” plugin, but it didn’t work. I also tried to delete those teeming users 50 at a time, but the system bogged down.

    So I added the wp-dbmanager plugin and — the bad — emptied the users table. My guess is that alongside those 50,000+ spammers, I deleted my account. At the very least, I can no longer log in.

    Am I right that I deleted my account? Is there a backdoor for admins to get in?

    Any help is appreciated.

    Cheers, JB

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

  • JB, have you attempted to login to your site since you deleted your admin account?

    Thread Starter Jay Bee

    (@jay-bee)

    Hi Mendel,

    And thanks for the quick response.

    I tried using both the /wp-admin and wp-login.php paths, I received an “invalid username” response for both.

    I also clicked “Lost your password?”. I tried my user name and both my registered emails. I received an “Invalid username or e-mail” each time.

    Cheers, Jim

    If you emptied the table, yes you deleted your own account as well.

    There’s a couple of ways to “recover” from this… but they aren’t that easy. Everything that you’d do really only has to re-create the users tables that yu emptied.

    The first option is to create a new site and copy the wp_users and wp_usermeta tables from the new database, and copy/move them to the existing database.

    The second is to create a new database, do a new installation on the current site, copy the two tables back to the existing database and switch back to that database.

    it’s not going to be easy, but it is possible to get back from where you are now.

    Thread Starter Jay Bee

    (@jay-bee)

    OK, I’ll give it a try. Thanks!

    Thread Starter Jay Bee

    (@jay-bee)

    Hi Mendel,

    Quick question: If I don’t want all of the users data back, but I only want to get access to the site, could I simply add an admin user to the database via MySQL?

    Cheers, Jim

    You can, but there’s a whole lot of fields in th wp_usermeta table that correspond to each user, including access levels, so unless you know what to add in there you’ll go back in as a subscriber, and may not get access at all.

    Thread Starter Jay Bee

    (@jay-bee)

    I was hoping to follow this tutorial. It seems fairly straightforward:

    https://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/create-a-wordpress-admin-user-for-a-wordpress-site-via-mysql-6649

    Honestly, if I come out of this with one admin account and none of the thousands of other “users” (a.k.a. spammers), I’ll be a happy camper!

    Cheers, Jim

    That is definately worth a try. It looks pretty comprehensive so see how you go. Good luck!

    So how’d it go?

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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