Shopsmith Forums

Is any of this due to "Baby Boomer" retirements? I joined in 06, but didn't really take time with it until after I retired in 2012. Just a thought.

That's some pretty staggering growth for an online forum that sees a relatively small number of participants...makes me wonder how many "cyber-bots" are making automatic memberships in hopes of spamming us or other unsavory and non-human participation (?) Just hard to see how we've really grown 30,000 real members in the past 8 months...sumthin's fishy...

dgale wrote:That's some pretty staggering growth for an online forum that sees a relatively small number of participants...makes me wonder how many "cyber-bots" are making automatic memberships in hopes of spamming us or other unsavory and non-human participation (?) Just hard to see how we've really grown 30,000 real members in the past 8 months...sumthin's fishy...

There is something really fishy. I logged "new members" for a short while thinking I was logging bad guys but Admin was apparently not concerned with the rapid influx, so I quit.

Nothing bad ever seemed to occur so I guess it was all a colossal waste of my time. Except that this forum now has a much, much longer list of inactive members - no harm done.

dusty wrote:There is something really fishy. I logged "new members" for a short while thinking I was logging bad guys but Admin was apparently not concerned with the rapid influx, so I quit.

Nothing bad ever seemed to occur so I guess it was all a colossal waste of my time. Except that this forum now has a much, much longer list of inactive members - no harm done.

It is fine with me if the 'Spam Bots' remain inactive here.

It might be that these new members are not the result of a spam bot at all.

There are many new members but I know of no significant increase in spam as a result of their joining the forum. That is what made this so curious. There seems to be no reason to join the forum with a bogus user name.

dusty wrote:It might be that these new members are not the result of a spam bot at all.

There are many new members but I know of no significant increase in spam as a result of their joining the forum. That is what made this so curious. There seems to be no reason to join the forum with a bogus user name.

Privacy paranoia?;)

I can't recall what the membership signup process was like for this site but many forums I'm on required some form of human pulse check to be able to activate the membership, such as respnding to an e-mail, entering one of those obscured letter/number codes, or at least in one case I remember, you had to write a comment to the administrator about the forum to demonstrate you were real. I realize no one at SS wants to take the time to control membership enrollment but at least some of these options were automated.

As noted, no harm seems to come from the plethora of inactive "members". On a few forums I'm on, they will delete inactive members after a certain period of time, but in this case that seems like a potentially bad idea as I'm sure at least some % of new members are a SS owner who came searching the answer to a question or two or to otherwise lurk and may not visit again until they have another question or other reason to return...