A paradox.

[Darkhog]

Usually I see more than 10 users online on forums and yet nothing is going on around here (and 10 users is pretty generous - at the time of writing this, there are 132 users online, including 57 members). I feel that only posters are me, WILL, Nuno <insert hard to spell last name here> (guy from Allegro.pas), User147 and SilverWarrior. There's also occasionally some bystander posting, but for the most part nothing is really going on (or forum script is evil and automatically marks all forums read each refresh).

The question is, why it happens?

[Daikrys]

in personally dont do anything pascal related lately so i dont have anything to post but i like to follow interesting threads and add posts when i feel like it might be useful

[SilverWarior]

As a moderator I can tell you that most of those users besides few of us you see are actually spam boots. Yes unfortunately like many other forus around the web even our is being swarmed by spam bots.
Each day I myself delete between 20 to 50 spam messages. But somedays like today there are even more than a hundred spam messages a day. And yes those are only in New Members section as that section is only one where new members can post anything. If new members would be able to post all around the forum it would be imposible to maintain it and delete all of that spam as the sheere number of messages would be much much higher.
Now you as a regular member never even see theese messages as they are being moderated and hidden from the rest of the comunity but there are still there.

I have sent several suggestion to Jason (Will) the owner of PGD site of how we can lower the amount of spam bots that manage to get throug Captcha system but he hasn't implemented them yet.
The main reasony why he hasn't done it yet is the fact that it would require some fidling with forum software and if not done right might only cause more troubles that it is worth.
Another reason is that he is spending most of his time with Paul developing their game and I certainly don't blame him for that. Developing a game is certainly more fund than fidling with forum software.
Anywhay for now the situation is still managable it surely does require some of the time of us moderators but this is the time we are willing to spend for making this comunits as it is.

So don't be to much concerned by the statistics becouse by statistisc we would probably be one of the greatest (hugest) comunities out there (out of 171411 registered members only 1121 actualy posted athleas one message). And in last half year we got almost 50000 new registered members, most of them are spam bots.

[Darkhog]

Oh, that's bad... I mean spambots. Since I see this site is running vBulletin (which is problem by itself as vBulletin is shitty and pretty much equivalent of suisse cheese in terms of security, but that's not the point), maybe this can help reduce amount of spam?

[SilverWarior]

@Darkhog
Check your PM