Bot Culling
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Well, we finally did a massive, manual culling of the users in the hopes of eliminating bots and scam users. We've had no issues with fake posting (yet, knock on wood) but we did have a huge and sudden creation of fake accounts a few months ago that was pretty problematic. Roughly five thousand fake accounts were created which caused us to have no idea as to account creation rates, how many real users that there were and just very little visibility into the entire system.
So tonight we manually attempting to sift through all of the accounts on the system, about 5,800 in total, and cut it down to just the genuine users. This was a lot of effort and we really, really hope that no one with a real account got deleted although, chances are, a few people did. If so, we are really sorry but there was very little that we could do. We worked from user names, email addresses, lack of posting, lack of avatar and other factors to try to determine if an account was real. Dealing with so many to delete it is just too likely that one or two real ones got caught in the culling.
No accounts with any activity were lost. That we are confident of. But it is possible that idle accounts with real people intending to use them might have been deleted. Please just recreate your account, if that is the case. Hopefully with the anti-bot systems we have in place now this will never be an issue like this again in the future.
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So the question is then.... how many users does ML actually have?
And the answer is... 260. Two hundred and sixty real, live humans using the site. That might seem like a low number to some, but it is actually a very high, very healthy number. For a site with no advertising and no product to have 260 real people using it, and that number is always increasing (a little less than one a day, of course, but still, increasing) that is a really great number. We are very happy with the community growth and userbase.
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Out of interest, and not to compare in any way, how many active forum users does Spiceworks have, do you know?
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A lot more than that
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That is a pretty big number of account differences... And not easy to do.
To those involved in the Cull - Thank you.
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Thank you for that!
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I count 322.
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It's grown since the culling but nowhere near that much.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's grown since the culling but nowhere near that much.
Maybe you miscounted? I counted 19 rows of 17 (based on my screen) with the last row missing one. So 322.
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I've going by the database's counting mechanism.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I've going by the database's counting mechanism.
I physically did the math based on the Users page.
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You are right, that page shows well over 300. No idea why they "User Count" is so low. A bug to report!
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@scottalanmiller said:
You are right, that page shows well over 300. No idea why they "User Count" is so low. A bug to report!
No idea..
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For those curious, the major difference between us and another site, is that while we have fewer members, only 90/322 of our members have never posted. That means that 72% have made at least one post. Only 28% have an account but have never posted. And of the total members, 118 have hit at least double digits for post count, making up almost 37% having made 10 or more posts. Last, we've got 13 people of only just over 300 that have over 1K posts! Great job everyone!
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And many of those who have never posted never did due to technical problems with the socket.io system early on.
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@scottalanmiller said:
And many of those who have never posted never did due to technical problems with the socket.io system early on.
Maybe, maybe not.
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Fréé V1/\gRA gopher://arandomblog.com/become-a-millionaire-with-magazine-subscriptions/
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So when will ML put Advertising on Spiceworks? haha.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
So when will ML put Advertising on Spiceworks? haha.
They've asked
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
So when will ML put Advertising on Spiceworks? haha.
They've asked
Seriously? Now THAT'S funny!
