for the last few months the forum has seen a dramatic increase in the number of spam accounts. a few weeks ago i identified one possible reason - i had forgotten to add rel="nofollow" to user profile links, which stops them from being useful to spammers. but they either did not realize or did not care that i had closed this hole, and the registrations continued. more recently, we have also been seeing bots that post spam threads as well as spam profiles (i am aware that these "bots" are probably real people).
with the recent server move, performance problems from carrying around all these tens of thousands of bot accounts became more apparent, and i decided to trim older user accounts that never interacted with the forum in any meaningful way, even though the bot epidemic is not yet over. so if your account got deleted, sorry, but you can just reregister.
i am also experimenting with very selective filtering to prevent the thread-posting bots from successfully posting. obviously let me know (via email if you have to, njahnke@gmail.com) if you are encountering a problem with that, like it won't let you post or something. thanks.
with the recent server move, performance problems from carrying around all these tens of thousands of bot accounts became more apparent, and i decided to trim older user accounts that never interacted with the forum in any meaningful way, even though the bot epidemic is not yet over. so if your account got deleted, sorry, but you can just reregister.
i am also experimenting with very selective filtering to prevent the thread-posting bots from successfully posting. obviously let me know (via email if you have to, njahnke@gmail.com) if you are encountering a problem with that, like it won't let you post or something. thanks.
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