Thanks for the additional context. Agreed, manually approving and filtering is not efficient here. Spamcheck suggested in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30480296 should be the path.
The API is good enough to write some Python code that does this way faster. Some autoclassification based on keywords helps a lot too.
I made some scripts to do this, but would have to extract them from beside the user data in the repo.
> You can disable signups,
I want potential GSoC participants to be able to sign up.
> or require all users to being approved by an administrator, if that works for your instance.
I don't have time to hand separate the Indonesian casino spammers from the potential GSoC participants. And I do mean "by hand"-- the Gitlab UI requires me to click a button to open up a secondary menu, then choose add or delete, then wait for the user screen to reload.
At least when sifting through an email spam folder back in the 90s I could press the delete button multiple times in a row. Even that would be a relatively usable solution.