As some of you may have noticed, the number of spam posts here has risen a bit lately. Actually, it’s risen a whole lot. We average well over 1,000 new spam posts a day, every day, but the system automatically catches and removes almost all of them. Occasionally, a few will get through which our generous moderators nuke for us.
In an attempt to limit this, we’ve recently done some cleanup on the forums’ back end. We deleted all posts marked as spam, and then we analyzed all usernames to find the ones that did not have any posts left in the forums. These were users (or bots) who had registered for the purposes of creating spam. We deleted all these users from the system. This may help reduce the number of spam comments we get going forward.
If you had created a username for the site but had never posted anything, your username was collateral damage in this clean-up effort. The impact to you will be minimal. You can still read everything in the forums, and none of your posts were deleted because you hadn’t made any. But if you had created a username and had not posted any content, you’ll need to recreate that username now. We may, as well, have caught one or two people out who were creating usernames and posts while we were working on this. If that’s the case for you, we apologize. Please recreate your username.
