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I have been asked several times about the number of members on the site and why it is different than your member numbers so I thought I would answer here for everyone to see.
Currently if you look on the main page of the forum you will see that we have 4,916 members however if you click on the newest member's user name (currently "wagon") and look at the link's address (the URL) you will see that he is actually member number 10,616. So why is there a difference?
10,616 people have signed up for an account here. When you sign up I have to manually verify your account and before I do that, I do a search for your username, IP address, etc. to see if you pop up on a known spammers list. If you do then I delete the account. It's the only way to really cut down on SPAM. Since I started doing this after several Spammers posted on the site three years ago it has eliminated 99% of the SPAM.
Also, if a user doesn't verify their email within address by following the link that is sent to everyone when they sign up, after several weeks the site is set to automatically delete the account. This also is a SPAM / Robot prevention measure.
A lot of forums don't delete accounts but rather just delete the SPAM and ban the users. Either way accomplishes the same thing but this way the SPAM doesn't show up in the first place. The downside is that it is labor intensive and of course if I didn't do this we would currently be at 10,616 members.
Currently if you look on the main page of the forum you will see that we have 4,916 members however if you click on the newest member's user name (currently "wagon") and look at the link's address (the URL) you will see that he is actually member number 10,616. So why is there a difference?
10,616 people have signed up for an account here. When you sign up I have to manually verify your account and before I do that, I do a search for your username, IP address, etc. to see if you pop up on a known spammers list. If you do then I delete the account. It's the only way to really cut down on SPAM. Since I started doing this after several Spammers posted on the site three years ago it has eliminated 99% of the SPAM.
Also, if a user doesn't verify their email within address by following the link that is sent to everyone when they sign up, after several weeks the site is set to automatically delete the account. This also is a SPAM / Robot prevention measure.
A lot of forums don't delete accounts but rather just delete the SPAM and ban the users. Either way accomplishes the same thing but this way the SPAM doesn't show up in the first place. The downside is that it is labor intensive and of course if I didn't do this we would currently be at 10,616 members.
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