Membership trimmed....

[~kaos~]

Just in case anyone has noticed the decline in the number of members.....
I recently went thru the database and 'cleaned' any accounts that have been inactive for 365 days or more.

[~kaos~]

UPDATE: You may have noticed that the forum is on a temporary manual sign-up system, here is what I've been able to research thus far....
Our website was being hit by aprox 25-30 bogus request for membership each day. If kept in check on a daily basis not really a big job just never ending. And if you let it go a few days the choir took 30+ minutes. After months of that it gets to be kind of a pain, thus the reason for the manual sign up. During this temp period I've been able to monitor our website visits and use, it's been interesting. There have been times when there were only myself & 6 guests on site. Of those 6 only 2 were actually clicked into forum topics, the other 4 never did. My assumption, bots....
I'll keep doing some more research and keep you all posted. Thanks....

[Edwin]

Thanks Kaos....
I need to do some research, as there are ways to negate the bots, but it takes work....just like fighting viruses

[Spitlebug]

just like fighting viruses

That's what condoms are for.

In all seriousness though. The ICD-O requires admin approval for users that are registering from a bank of IP ranges. Also, if you aren't registered you can not view the site. That keeps the crawlers and spider bots at arms length.

[~kaos~]

Well I hate to totally shut the site down to guests as we get a lot of people that just need to stop in for a quick how to or something. I did make a small adjustment to the validation code, so far it seems to be doing the trick.