100 Users!

That’s great to hear. I think I estimated about 20% bots however organic activity is on the rise which is more important. 

Feeling compelled to post here has made me absent from SC. 

Glad to hear...I’ve read some posts on SC but haven’t posted there in a while.

Posted by: @dev

That’s great to hear. I think I estimated about 20% bots however organic activity is on the rise which is more important. 

Feeling compelled to post here has made me absent from SC. 

 

 

For me, it's been a bit of  a struggle to post on SC ever since the initial sale.  That really left a bad taste in my mouth.  However, I posted and interacted there on occasion just to see what all was happening in the community and helping people out when appropriate.  Since this site is now up and is getting more use each day, I'm only on here unless I'm responding to a PM on the other site.  I'm also researching how to write features or addons to this forum plugin.  So, I'm really more dedicated to this place now more than ever.

I've gone in and set some of the obvious bot users to "banned" status.  But I haven't gotten them all.  Once we can get that custom question added for registration, that should cut down on those as well.

Eventually I think a good pruning is in order. It is humorous to see how fake some of the user names are. 

It will always be a big failure to encourage people to post for the sake of generating activity or to expect more people to join.  A nice slow progression is better in the long run. It keeps things genuine when it comes to real content  is clearly what the corporations want but they end up ruining it with being lame.  

Posted by: @erdoc48

Glad to hear...I’ve read some posts on SC but haven’t posted there in a while.

I think I've been back to SC about 3 times since I made my exit.  This is where I hang my hat now.  Like my dad used to say, "If you don't like their service/product, vote with your feet."  The ads there and the new format just don't work for me.

Great news. That said, I find myself still at the old forum frequently. Not because I want to but when I google something...guess what's in the search results. Someone should crawl the content over there and dump it here. That said, I just read, don't post but I imagine my presence alone adds to their bottom line.

I did some pruning.  We are down to 83 active users.  And I am pretty sure all of them are real people.  Or really good bot attempts at least.

Wow that came close to my 20% estimate.  I think it might be little more than that but at least we don't have that baggage waiting to hatch. The one we did have hatch  early on was for sure human. Labor is so cheap in other counties it wouldn't surprise me that they farm out this service. 

I've been watching and it looks like we have a good process setup. I think the email verification and setting the password has prevented all bots from truly going active to post. Most of the accounts, as stated previously, have been .ru based email accounts. When they're made, I can tell within a few minutes if they're legitimate or not because all legitimate accounts send me a second email when the password is set.

I just added a plugin that adds a challenge question as well as refuses emails with the extensions as configured.  We won't be getting anymore .info or .ru users.

The downside is that the challenge question still allows the registration to go through with invlaid answers.  I have a question to the developer now to see what could be wrong.  At a minimum we are at least will cut down on the majority of the ones coming in recently.