Well, as you can see, I have the number of "members" down from nearly 4,000 to 1,744.? With even a generous assessment of our true membership at 200 people, there are obviously about 1,544 more fake "members" to root out.? For this, I must be more careful, and since the spam has stopped I can be more patient with this process.? I was thinking now at looking at when each member had last been online.? I ran into problems when I noticed some legitimate members who hadn't been on in a LONG time.? John at WEM, for example, posted three times but hasn't been back here in almost two years.? ?
? However, given a pause, I'm thinking it would be safe to delete the many pages of members who have registered here, but who have NEVER actually logged onto the account AND have NEVER posted anything.? What do you guys think?? I suppose there is a possibiity of deleting a couple of people who intended to participate honestly, but then for whatever reason, they never did.? In such a case, I'm not sure it's much harm deleting such an inactive account.
One last troubling thing is that many of the accounts I am relatively sure are not honest are logged into frequently.? I am referring here to accounts which meet some of the conditions for being suspicious and have never posted.? Many pages of them are logging in here frequently, and I'm trying to figure out why since they haven't posted anything to this point.
I was watching the board traffic, and for several days after I turned off registrations, I was able to watch automated web traffic (showing up as "guest") picking through the forums and even attempting to register.? There were usually 20 or so attempts going on at any one moment.? That seems to be slowing down now.?