Member Maintenance

[Chakara]

  Hi all.  I decided to do some maintenance on the member accounts.  There were over 4000 accounts on this system that hadn't been logged into in over 90 days - and that had less than 10 posts.  I purged them all.  I would guess over 95% of them had 0 posts.

  Lately there have  been dozens of accounts created daily.  While they are getting through the CAPCHA and e-mail validation - they seem to be sitting idle.  It's making me nervous so I will be purging like this periodically.

  Sorry if any legit accounts go caught up in my zealous rampage of deleting......

-Chak

[ralph]

All spammers.
I have another forum related to the Telrad product.
I checked my stats for yesterday and had over 500 unique visitors to the site. 
All attempting to register.   Almost all from the Chec Republic.
If you know anything at all about the Telrad product, you'd know there isn't enough people looking for product support to register 1 a month.
It's enough to make you want to break someones fingers.
The problem is, they are all bots.   No finger - dang it!
What I've done is set my system to ban from certain IP ranges.   
This fills my logs with reports of people trying to registered but are banned.
Can't win.

Ralph

[Chakara]

  Yeah, I agree.  Very frustrating.  I just can't see why there are literally 1000's of accounts that have never posted.  Sometimes they might have a link or something in their profile so maybe that is it.  I just always fear that one day they will all go active and saturate the board beyond recovery

  I, like you, block whole chunks of the internet when someone actually spams.  Typically if it is from some country I don't care about I'll block the whole ISP or even more.  If it's from the US or UK or something I'm a little more selective - blocking a /24 typically.

As part of the maintenance (and forums software upgrade) there was a higher level of Captcha available that I have turned on.  Honestly, it is hard to read for me so maybe impossible for a bot?  I'm also considering a more aggressive validation process.  Perhaps something where "pre-registries" can post in a particular forum and must put something that makes since to get validated.  I'm kinda on the fence about that as I also suspect some of bogus accounts are being created by cheap labor in 3rd party countries.  I'll give you $.01/forum account to give me type of a deal.  Who the heck knows.

Anyway - again - I REALLY hope I didn't get any legitimate accounts in my cleanup.  If I did, please accept my sincere apologies....

-Chak