Unchained Preppers
Site Suggestions/ Questions/ Comments/Debugging => Help a brother prepper out => Topic started by: USMC0331 on September 10, 2013, 01:00:49 AM
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I know this is never a popular topic with board owners as numbers are important, but I looked at the member list and of 11 pages, 5 are of profiles that have never posted.
Ordering by websites (I was interested in what members have) the first one I hovered over (fallen_angel87) has "80sporn.com" as his website. Clearly a troll account or maybe a member that likes to share his porn fetish, either way not a productive member.
I'd rather have a small group of people that contribute to the conversation than a stat at the bottom of the page that says "300 members" when 120 of them are in name only.
Just my $0.02 worth and being a FNG, probably only worth $0.01 or $0.00001 if you account for inflation. :)
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Fuck I have written a long response about this and it got lost...
ok, the UP database comes from straightprep that had a problem with spammer accounts.
Here we have more countermeasures so spammers are not a problem, but the old accounts are still there.
I have reduced like 50% of the user DB, but I have to do it manually and is very time consuming.
I'll try using your approach of sorting them by website to prune a few more.
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This is an interesting post because our local Pagan Meetup.com page recently shut down due to this. We had a core group of maybe 10 that did stuff, about another 10 that showed up once or twice a year, but around 200 people on our Meetup. It was very disheartening and we finally determined that what we were offering was not of use to the community. They had found other ways of participating/finding community (and the snarky part of me says they found easier ways that didn't require their actual participation - if they only wanted a congregational experience I know a nice mega-church down the road... grrrr).
But my point is that we did try first thinning out people who hadn't come to any event in over two years and also asking people to give us feedback as to why they weren't coming, etc. The good of it is that we figured out what need wasn't being addressed, what the core of us who did participate wanted and were able to discard the useless bits and our core group is far healthier and happier for the dumping of the excessive weight that was the Meetup. I think lurkers are all well and good - I'm not shy when it comes to public interaction, but a lot of people are. However, narrowing down the membership to actually active folks - maybe by number of log ons within a certain period (if they haven't logged on since they created their account a year ago, for instance) might allow the board to focus more on the needs of those actually participating.
The caveat to that is that the posts on the board that are old are a great resource to read through, even if the person who posted it hasn't been on in a year and a half!
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All good points Wellie.
It's kind of like pruning back the fruit trees.
I get lazy at times and some years I forget to cut back (prune) the apple & pear tree's. The following year my yield is less. If I skip two years in a row - OUCH! The fruit is smaller and a lot less quantity.
I am sure the forum is similar. :pirateThumbUp:
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Sorry guys, but having a lot of inactive members in our DB doesn't impact us negatively at all.
The idea is just to clean up the spammer accounts, or the never used accounts.
Deleting old accounts isn't good as it screws up old posts, that also contain juicy info.
If you want to see the members active lately you have available the sorting by last visit, or you can check the list of users that visited the board today at the bottom of the main page.
Is natural that our user database will grow, as long as they aren't spammer accounts I don't have a problem at all.
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Dang! So you didn't like my fruit tree analogy? :dancingBanana:
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Dang! So you didn't like my fruit tree analogy? :dancingBanana:
:lmfao:
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Cleaning up the spammer account and those that have not logged in in over a year was what I was suggesting, not killing off "lurkers" :)
Fruit tree analogy, not your best work ;p
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We never went though the list back when it was SP because it wasn't worth the trouble. Like APX has stated carrying those dead accounts doesn't hurt anything while removing them could. The problem is and has always been one of man power.
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How does removing a ZERO post account that has not signed on in over a year and has porn sites linked to them "hurt" this forum?
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With accounts with 0 posts there is no problem, the problem comes with accounts not used for a long time.
Special-K told us he was going to remove many unused 0 post accounts, so very soon the list will be cleaned up a little more.
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Today Special-K deleted 101 accounts, and I deleted 36 more.
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Good job APX and SK! Thanks :thumbsUp:
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How does removing a ZERO post account that has not signed on in over a year and has porn sites linked to them "hurt" this forum?
Their profile links to porn sites makes Google think this site is either dead wood and poorly moderated, or simply run as a way to promote the porn and other spam site. Either way, even though it's BS, it's bad in the eyes of Google.
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How does removing a ZERO post account that has not signed on in over a year and has porn sites linked to them "hurt" this forum?
Their profile links to porn sites makes Google think this site is either dead wood and poorly moderated, or simply run as a way to promote the porn and other spam site. Either way, even though it's BS, it's bad in the eyes of Google.
That won't happen here at UP, because in order to see the members' profiles, where the weird links were, you need to be logged in.
Google and the other spiders inspect the site as guests.
EDIT: Besides we have some restrictions in the robots.txt
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How does removing a ZERO post account that has not signed on in over a year and has porn sites linked to them "hurt" this forum?
Their profile links to porn sites makes Google think this site is either dead wood and poorly moderated, or simply run as a way to promote the porn and other spam site. Either way, even though it's BS, it's bad in the eyes of Google.
That won't happen here at UP, because in order to see the members' profiles, where the weird links were, you need to be logged in.
Google and the other spiders inspect the site as guests.
EDIT: Besides we have some restrictions in the robots.txt
I assumed as much so I didn't bother looking before I posted, but the mods here seem more technically competent than mods on most non-tech related forums. In other words, you guys run a pretty tight ship. :thumbsUp:
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Robots.txt and META tags work for the nice crawlers, but the best method is not to allow spam accounts to gain access to memberlists, and tin foil areas that you don't want public. Having old spammer accounts active allows that access.
http://unchainedpreppers.com/forum/profile/?u=245 (http://unchainedpreppers.com/forum/profile/?u=245) is a good example of such.
Thanks for cleaning up the bulk of them APX, I appreciate it!
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Damn, you're a specialist finding spammer accounts :bravo:
Please tell us if you find more we can delete them, all the ones you'll find are old, at UP no spammer was able to register an account yet :D
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That's what my friends meant when they said I was "Spechul"?! :)
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APX?if you haven't already, you should be able to run a search on the back end on usernames and email addresses. I used to do this when moderating a lot of phpBB and vBulletin forums. You want to look for:
- certain keywords in usernames (porn, viagra, xanax, weight loss, etc.?basically anything spammers tend to target)
- certain keywords in profile links
- certain keywords in email addresses
- addresses that are clearly bogus, i.e. kjndfvjnkdkjnkj@hotmail.com
- certain TLDs (.ru was always a big one, but there are others)
- You can also look at anyone with a free email account (Hotmail, Gmail, etc.) but that may be wasted time as most people in this circle probably have those as opposed to their own domains.
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Thanks for the suggestions Jeremy
I think we got rid of all the spammer accounts, yesterday I deleted 3 more besides the one DVC told me and I couldn't find more.