doesn't the huge increase in membership have anyone
scratching their head ?

almost 75 members in just a few days ?

what happened to the 'purge' that was going to happen ?

The working theory about our flood of non-member memberships is fairly easy to explain.

Since we're now exposed to the world on two major link sites, the professional spammers are looking at our forums to see if we're an easy target for their ad posts. All things considered, we're fairly lucky that this increase in non-participating members is all we're having to face.

Somewhere out on the web is a very hostile place called somethingawful.com. The forums there run like a 24 hour a day episode of The Jerry Springer show. And they mount attacks on the forums and comment boards of websites they don't like. Thankfully, we're not likely to become a target of their kind of hate spam. But they're not alone.

All in all, we're fairly well off in a place where garbage is dumped on the virtual road side by the metric ton. We can go through the non-posting membership database and purge those accounts with ease.

I'm on vacation and I haven't been able to access the internet much this week. Thus the dozens of illegitimate new members that I usually delete every day haven't been cleaned out yet. I'm going to make Max an administrator now and ask him to help me out in fighting the good fight. I guess we'll basically be co-moderators from now until I take my break next month. Does that sound ok to you Max?

- Doc

Sounds good to me.

The rule of thumb about profiles is that if there's a clear attempt to post a commercial link that has no value to any member of HIPComix, that member's account will be removed.

I hate to be cutthroat about things, but we've got a small invasion going on in the forum. I've removed an average of five spam posts a day since I started. I think after a month or two, we'll get the reputation in the ad spammer community that we're not an easy target and they'll move on to newer pastures.

Well, after three days of pruning, the members list is as clean as I can make it.

The real issue is that we're getting 15 new members every day, three to five of them posting spam to the GD area.

We're holding the line as long as the GD is scanned every 6 hours.

nice work, max. it's a dirty job, but work that is appreciated. thank you.

For those who may not have noticed, I've changed the name of General Discussions to Odds and Ends. This seems to have clipped the automatic poster software a bit.

Now the ad posts are winding up in Doc Robo's area once a day.

The upside to all of this is that the activities have slipped to a quarter of the past hits we've taken.