Goodman Games

Ye gods! The number of member birthdays shown at bottom of the main page is staggering. As many as I have years!

I wonder how many of those accounts are spam accounts...?

Yes, there are a ridiculous number of spam accounts out there. The forums software is adept at keeping them from posting (with some human review) but it's pretty amazing how well they pass all the "human tests" (like figuring out the "fuzzy letter box" and other such things) in order to get accounts created in the first place. I need to upgrade the boards to the newest software -- supposedly it is even better at keeping them from creating accounts in the first place...

I've been wanting to trim out accounts for the spambots, but there are hundreds of pages of accounts with zero posts and I can't figure any way to get rid of them in bunches. I don't know if I have the patience to clear out a thousand accounts one at a time.

finarvyn wrote:I've been wanting to trim out accounts for the spambots, but there are hundreds of pages of accounts with zero posts and I can't figure any way to get rid of them in bunches. I don't know if I have the patience to clear out a thousand accounts one at a time.

What about just clearing them on on their 'birthdays'? Would that not get through them fast enough? The number listed for today is kind of staggering...

GnomeBoy wrote:What about just clearing them on on their 'birthdays'? Would that not get through them fast enough? The number listed for today is kind of staggering...

I second that emotion!

lol -- I've just noticed my adjective of choice for being shocked by the number of spam birthdays is 'staggering'. I can't say I use it much in everyday speech, but it's occurred twice in this thread. Hmm.

The chances of the word "staggering" appearing twice in such a short thread is, well, staggering!

*smacks forehead*

*staggers around the room for a moment*

Does this mean we need to get a post on the board or we'll be consigned to the nether? Don't underestimate the number of ghosts you might have, silently haunting these halls, absorbing the wisps of wisdom floating therein!

EeonEM wrote:Does this mean we need to get a post on the board or we'll be consigned to the nether? Don't underestimate the number of ghosts you might have, silently haunting these halls, absorbing the wisps of wisdom floating therein!

Congrats on your first post. You are now a human.

Remember that even if a person without posts does get wiped out somehow, you can still read the boards. I saw that there are some members who joined in 2003 and still have yet to make a single post.

My hope would be to mostly trim out spammers and give us a reasonable number of people on the rolls. If you want to find a particular user and are not 100% certain of their name, you have a lot of junk to sort through just to find them. Not so convenient, IMO.

This will probably be a project for a long weekend or vacation, however. Hard to find a few spare hours otherwise.

EeonEM wrote:Does this mean we need to get a post on the board or we'll be consigned to the nether? Don't underestimate the number of ghosts you might have, silently haunting these halls, absorbing the wisps of wisdom floating therein!

We have ghosts!
*Gets up from chair and staggers out of the room white as a sheet*