How to delete all WordPress authors who never posted?

Question

Is there a way to delete all WordPress authors which have 0 posts?

Answer 1

Go into the admin panel and delete them?

Or do you have thousands to delete?

Answer 2

To see each user and the number of posts of which he or she is the author:

select user_login, (select count(*) from wp_posts where post_author = wp_users.ID)
from wp_users

I'm not sure if it's safe to just delete rows from the wp_users table just because the user hasn't posted anything. There may be references to the account from other tables. It should, however, be safe to set the password:

update wp_users wp_users left join wp_posts on wp_users.ID = post_author
set user_pass = 'blocked'
where post_author is null