Zelaron needs an overhaul

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.

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.

Nice, we're already popped up on page 3 for Gaming Forums. I'll have someone blast some links to help speed things up a bit when I get some time.

Nice We're getting a bit more active, for instance, I just went to new posts and it wasn't all skurai.

We need more content. allowing anonymous users is the only viable option at this point.

Agreed, we could allow a few posts per IP address then require them to register. Like D3V said in another post, put captchas on it.

We did try guest posts once.





Shit loads of spam.





Turned them off.

Of course, if they can be coupled with a CAPTCHA and a daily post-limit by IP, they may work better.

Edit:

I've just been going over a few threads in the Staff forum to find the ones about guest posting. We decided in the beginning that CAPTCHAs and limits by IPs were a pain, because people wouldn't be able to quick sign-up and post - they'd have to wait for all the confirmation e-mails. After a while, which just so happened to see a huge number of spam posts, it was decided that guest posting was to be stopped, as the vast majority of posts were spam, and we had a tiny ratio of people registering (something like 200:1).

I was thinking an ever post limit by IP, so they can post like 10 times then they have to register.