Member Stats

[Fitzcarraldo]

Yes, my idea was to start very conservatively to see how it went. If it had worked, I would have pruned a little more of the users who have never posted; say those who joined up to end 2008 and have not posted. And so on.

Coming back to your comparison with the Mepis Forums, it looks to me like they do prune users, as 3775 users feels like a realistic figure to me. My guesstimate for the SL forums is a few hundred bona fide members, perhaps roughly 1,000 real members, with less than 100 members who have posted more than 100 posts.

[alonsoty]

Is true, I do not think you can make a precise idea of attendance in a forum if you do not maintain regularly an active users list.
Furthermore, what you have proposed is certainly very "delicate", I do not think there is anyone that might feel offended ...
In addition, in some situations (usually the smaller communities), I believe there is found a greater uniformity in way of use the various communication channels... much more than the adherence to common sense.

Despite I'm the perfect example of those people who use the forum in a incredibly uneven way.
I think there are many people who focuses ciclically on different interests in his spare time... maybe even years later they come back on the same thing!!!

I joined up in September 2006, and only in September 2010 I wrote my first post!
To my great surprise (though I admit that I was glad) I saw that my account still existed.
I do not think I would be disturbed in any way by the fact that my account had been deleted after four years of inactivity...
Ciao

[chasha420]

What I don't understand is why is this forum subject to spam? I mean of all the other forums...I don't want my favorite forum to get spammed!

The only way to stop active spammers that I can think of is to enable captchas when people make a post...like what I've seen in a lot of other forums & this seems to be quite effective. Yes, may be it is not fool proof or won't stop a determined spammer but it will gradually decrease the amount of spam and they will eventually lose interest.

Btw, one of the reason I love this forum is because there are very knowledgeable people here who are always a great source to learn from...even though it's not as big as the Ubuntu community. Ubuntu forums imo is all about people who are new to Linux and often I get irritated when I hear threads like "Help! How do I install Ubuntu!? How do I run Microsoft Office? etc."

I guess it's a natural process that people slowly tend to move towards their matter of interest. Best of all we got people like FitzCarraldo here who always seem to come up with a solution to just about anything!

[chasha420]

Slightly off of this topic in this offtopic section

I'm a coder & I was trying to learn some of the other advanced python modules as usual & I started messing with mechanize (trying to learn it, etc.) & I decided to see for myself how hard it would be to by pass the login mechanism in this forum...& shockingly it just took 10-12 lines of code to bypass & login as a legitimate user. So, no wonder this forum has been flooded with bots...I do think captcha is really necessary here (let's say during user login) to prevent spammers from deteriorating the quality of this forum.

[Fitzcarraldo]

^That's very interesting. Thanks for the information. I'll point it out to some of the other guys and see if there is anything that can be done to make it more difficult for the spammers (we get several daily, on average) to post in these forums.

[Fitzcarraldo]

There are phpBB tools to perform maintenance on the user base. A few months ago I had a look through the Members list, and there is a very large number of members who have zero posts (mostly spammers) or have never posted in several years. I was contemplating a very gentle first pruning using the following filters:

Prune users who:
- Joined: Before: 2007-01-01
- Last active: Before: 2007-01-01
- Posts: Equal to: 0
- Delete pruned user posts: No
- Deactivate or delete user: Delete

Then:
- Resynchronise statistics
- Recalculate the total number of posts, topics, users and files.

But one of my forum admin. colleagues is nervous about us using the pruning tools in case there is a problem and it messes up the forum, and has asked me to hold off. And there's no way on God's Earth that I am looking through a list of some 31,400 users and deleting offending users one-by-one manually.

We are deluged with spammers, and I decided enough is enough. Pruned the membership today, 28 May 2011, using the above method and it got rid of 846 registered members (spammers). It still leaves a huge number of people (the vast majority spammers) who have registered since the Forums opened in 2005 but have never posted (a further 19,027 to date, to be precise). So that would take the membership down to 6,320. Some of those are spammers too, but that gives a more realistic idea of real SL users who are members of the SL Forums.

EDIT: Got rid of several thousand more registered 'users' who have never posted. The Forums are now down to 14,356 members. Still a lot of spammers in there.

EDIT2: OK, have pruned some more registered 'users' who have never posted. The Forums are now down to 9,225 members. Still a lot of spammers in there with one or a few posts, but getting better.

[lxnay]

Fitzcarraldo:
why didn't you ask for my authorization?
Please contact me ASAP, since I guess you made a big mess.

[joost]

Not sure on who's authorization this was done but the forum members database is also used for bugzilla and Entropy (user content).

@Fitz Please contact staff when you want to make drastic changes like this.

[lxnay]

You did a very silly thing and your admin rights were dropped.
Next time you'll think about it twice.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Whoops. Apologies. My intention was to prune members with zero posts since they joined, many with spam links in their signatures and/or Home Page in their profile, and many who joined years ago but never posted (presumably the vast majority, bots). Just out of interest, what effect does deleting members who have never made a post have (be they a spammer or not)? Does it cause problems in the phpBB database?