But it's been like this for years. I remember a summer where weeks would go by without anything to read.

The real question is do you guys love this place enough to try to resurrect it or are we gonna just leave it dead?

But then we'd have to remember all kinds of new names, and personalities, and it'd just be a hassle...

See? So lets revive it. Quick! Does someone have a Phoenix Down?

I think we need a Phoenix Pinion.

I implemented some of the suggested metadata changes a week ago. My next priority is to look into the prospect of making registrations mandatory for guests (on an IP basis) who have viewed more than 5 threads.

Keep posting your suggestions!

Registrations aren't our problem. I see tons of new people a week, it's getting them to post that is the problem. They all come for the arcade.

Most of the people who register are spam bots. You just never see them because new users have to be approved unless they are posting in the introductions forum. That's why the only time you see spambots, it's in that forum. The mods probably see 10x more spambots than normal users do.

Well that would explain things.

It's nowhere near as bad as it used to be - during the first half of 2010, we regularly had more new spam posts than actual posts by a factor of at least three. These days, I'm lucky if I get to delete one spam thread a week. :(

If anyone is interested, the current stats are: 5059 deleted posts and 1619 deleted threads on the forum. Now these are "soft" deletes, which means that they can be retrieved. I have no way of finding out how many posts and threads have been deleted in total (soft and hard deletes), but it's bound to be a lot more (particularly as this is post #697,061).

I suppose it's possible to go back through every post and see which I can view with my permissions, and which I can't, but I don't want to do it manually, and I can't be bothered writing a script.

As an aside, this is the earliest accessible post: http://zelaron.com/forum/showpost.php?p=4.

I think on May 15th we might start to get some activity as a lot of people here play diablo III. I'm currently playing the open beta (I love it)

We also improved the CAPTCHA around that time. I don't hard delete much, so your stats are probably good. I do move a lot of soft deleted spam threads to the trash.

Is it just that you don't want to take the time to sift through to hard delete them? Because I don't see much of a point of leaving them to be resurrected.

Two reasons why things are soft deleted: in the Mod Drop-down Menu when we select a post/thread, there's an option to "Delete post/thread as spam", which soft deletes the post (and allows us to ban the user in one fell swoop)l and Admin's are the only ones with the permissions to hard delete posts and threads.

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I remember the discussions about changing the CAPTCHA's! Good times. :)

Well what I meant was why not go through and hard delete them all, or would that unban the spam bot?

More work. Also, we don't generally hard delete things so that if questions arise, the evidence is still there. At this point, it probably doesn't matter; more habbit than anything.

I think that our best bet right now would be to harness the influx of people looking to discuss the upcoming blizzard games since a lot of people here already play them

I still think we should try and make our own game. No idea how, though...

Zelaron had its own game, for a while.

We had a game? When did we have a game?