Things We Learned Today... | Page 39 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Ron Nasty said

@Starr Shine? said
That 1053 accounts were deleted from this forum. So that’s about one in every 4 members are deleted.

While the first half of your statement may well be right, your methodology does seem reasonable, that does not mean Joe has deleted 1 in 4 members of the forum. The vast majority of deleted accounts are people attempting to spam the forum whose initial spam has been blocked.

This is the reason that @Joe brought in the step that new accounts need approving by himself or a mod before a post can be seen.

If your figure is correct, it does not indicate deleted members, but blocked spam accounts.

The actual amount of deleted members is probably in single figures, or not much above. Joe does not like to ban people who have joined the forum. He does like to prevent us having to put with garbage spam though. So your figure would be a good estimate of how often people attempt to spam the forum, but nowhere near right for members of the forum that have been banned.

You cannot call a blocked spam account a member.

Your figure, if correct, just shows the good job Joe and the mods do in preventing spam getting through the gates.

“My name is Debbie. I earn $10,000 a day working from home, you too can by just…”

The vast majority of the figure you’ve come up with is just Joe and the mods taking out the trash behind our backs.

A huge round of applause is deserved for Joe and our great mods for all the efforts they take to prevent our beautiful forum being filled with garbage.

This isn’t actually entirely true. First of all, I did a purge a while ago of accounts that had never posted or logged in (ones which had been registered over a month earlier, so I didn’t cull new accounts which people hadn’t got round to using yet). That probably deleted several hundred. They were partly spam accounts that never got fully through the registration/moderation process, partly multiple accounts that people had registered to safeguard a selection of usernames, and also a number of accounts which people couldn’t use because for a time my server wasn’t sending out any welcome emails containing temporary passwords. Occasionally something goes awry and people never get the introductory email, so I have to test the sign-up process manually every Now And Then .

In the earlier days I was a bit more relaxed about letting the spam accounts remain in existence. Nowadays I tend to delete them once it looks fairly certain that it’s not a legitimate user registration (they’re fairly easy to spot).

FWIW I see everyone as a member as soon as they’ve registered an account. If their first post doesn’t get approved I’m likely to delete the account at the same time, so the account/member terms are fairly synonymous. Once a person has registered and received a welcome email, they’re members of the forum to me.

Also, we have first-post manual approval in place. However, some people write a dozen or so posts before one of the mods can get round to approving their first one. It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally. Those people are certainly legitimate members of the forum.

@Ron Nasty @Starr Shine?