Hello fellow forum members,
A very curious thing has been happening recently to our forum membership. Prior to January 2010, we had 83 members join over a period of 22 months. Then, in January, we doubled our membership with 81 new members for a total of 164 (see below). This is a curious anomaly by itself, considering that site traffic hasn't really gone up that much this past month (maybe 20% due to a few radio interviews that I did). Even more curious is that most of these new members don't post anything. Now, I've never understood the idea of joining a forum and not posting. You don't need to join to read the posts, so the only purpose of joining is to post. However, the last 59 new members have yet to post (with one exception who posted spam). So I am suspecting that these new members are the result of some sort of member-generation bot and don't really represent real people. Feel free to prove me wrong, newbies! (wonder if Morpheus has become sentient and started creating little AI offspring
)
I have been dealing with a great deal of spam on the blog for many months now and finally had to shut off comments entirely, as most were just automated comments for the purpose of showing up on the pages and generating back links to some low interest loan website (or worse!)
Anyway, I write this for two reasons. First, it is a challenge to the newbies to see if I am wrong (I doubt it). Second, it is a query to the real forum members to see if anyone has dealt with such bots before and has any ideas on how to deal with them. Thanks, friends!
