Auto Delete Users (auto_delete_users)

Question

Auto Delete Users (auto_delete_users)

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2022年3月4日 14:43

I need some help cause I couldn't find any solution for my problem and haven't the knowledge to solve the problem on my own.

What I'm trying to do: I want to delte every WordPress user (subscriber) which is older than X days. For testing purposes I needed short intervals, in production the users should be deleted after 6 months. So each subscriber should be deleted after 6 months, after their registration.

What I've tried for testing purposes:

function wcs_auto_delete_users() {
    global $wpdb;
    $query = $wpdb-prepare( SELECT ID FROM $wpdb-users WHERE datediff( now(), user_registered )  0.1 );
    if ( $oldUsers = $wpdb-get_results( $query, ARRAY_N ) ) {
        foreach ( $oldUsers as $user_id ) {
            wp_delete_user( $user_id[0] );
        }
    }
}
add_action( 'wcs_daily_clean_database', 'wcs_auto_delete_users' );
wp_schedule_event( time(), 'hourly', 'wcs_daily_clean_database' );

The snippet above works, but it deletes every user, which I don't want.

So that's what I've tried further for testing purposes:

function auto_delete_users() {
    global $wpdb;
    $userlevel = 0; //0 = subscriber
    $deleteafter = (1/48); //delete User after 30 mins

    $query = $wpdb-prepare(SELECT $wpdb-users.ID FROM $wpdb-users LEFT JOIN $wpdb-usermeta ON $wpdb-users.ID = $wpdb-usermeta.user_id WHERE $wpdb-usermeta.meta_key = %s AND $wpdb-usermeta.meta_value = %d AND DATEDIFF(CURDATE(), $wpdb-users.user_registered)  %d, $wpdb-prefix.'user_level',$userlevel,$deleteafter);

    if($oldUsers = $wpdb-get_results($query, ARRAY_N)){
        foreach ($oldUsers as $user_id) {
            wp_delete_user($user_id[0]);
        }
    }
}
add_action('daily_clean_database', 'auto_delete_users');
wp_schedule_event(time(), 'hourly', 'daily_clean_database');

The snippet above doesn't work and maybe you could explain what I'm doing wrong or what I would have to adjust.

I also tried to schedule the event with cron_schedules every 15 minutes to avoid waiting 1 hour to call the function, but that's not important now.

Your help would be much appreciated.

Topic wp-cron user-roles cron user-registration Wordpress

Category Web

Tom J Nowell · Accepted Answer · 2022年3月4日 14:43

You do not need to use raw SQL, WordPress already provides WP_User_Query, and even provides examples of date based queries, for example the official docs say that this will retrieve all users registered within the last 12 hours:

$args = array(
    'date_query' => array( 
        array( 'after' => '12 hours ago', 'inclusive' => true )  
    )
);
$user_query = new WP_User_Query( $args );

Taken from: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/classes/wp_user_query/#date-parameters

Which suggests this might work:

$args = [
    'date_query' => [
        [
            'before' => '6 months ago',
            'inclusive' => true
        ]
    ]
];
$user_query = new WP_User_Query( $args );
if ( ! empty( $user_query->get_results() ) ) {
    foreach ( $user_query->get_results() as $user ) {
        echo '<p>delete: ' . $user->display_name . '</p>';
    }
} else {
    echo 'No users found.';
}

If you need to use raw SQL to get something in WordPress and you're not working with custom tables, then it generally means you've done something wrong or aren't aware of an important core API or parameter.

Other things to note:

This won't scale if your site gets popular as there's no limit on how many users your query fetches, you should run this more often and in batches
unless your host has a system level cron job this won't happen exactly every 6 months, there'll be a little variance depending on how busy your site is
there may be legal and regulatory obligations that require longer than 6 months, if the goal here is to prevent access after a subscription for example then this isn't the best way (no upsells to re-subscribe? Or message that the 6 months are up?)

Auto Delete Users (auto_delete_users)

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