14000 Members

[Overlandman]

14000 members today, 22nd April 2021, so just over 5 months for the last 1000
13000 member was 13th November 2020
12000 member was 13th September 2019
11000 member was 4th March 2018
10000 member was 14th January 2017

Once again thanks to Matt the administrators, moderators and forum members for making this a great site.
OLM

[crollsurf]

Be good to see more of those 14000 getting in on the conversation. Comming from an engineering background, I get why some are reluctant to voice their view but we're talking bushwalking, not publishing in a scientific journal.

Commando expresses views that aren't mainstream but no one is ripping into him, his opinions are respected.

Long term, its community and the bigger and more voices that get involved, the better.

Sent from my SM-G965F using Tapatalk

[FatCanyoner]

Those figures are unfortunately exaggerated by spammers. I was just looking at the full member list, which can be sorted by join date (http://bushwalk.com/forum/memberlist.ph ... memberlist). Scroll through and you will see hundreds with dodgy links in their bios (mostly to porn, pharmaceutical and gambling sites). They are bots that only join to post links with the objective of pushing those sites up in search engine rankings.

Given the huge numbers (I'd say the number may even be in the thousands), the forum membership is greatly exaggerated.

It'd take a lot of work, but a forum administrator should really spend a day deleting these spam accounts, banning the email addresses, and making the forum a less attractive spot for spammers.

[FatCanyoner]

Just as a follow up to this (part of my 'don't complain about volunteer run things unless you're willing to actually do it yourself' philosophy), I'm happy to assist with the culling of spammers / bots from the forum. I do similar with a small canyoning forum. After an initial chunk of time to clear out the fake members, it really would only take 5 minutes a day to keep on top of.

[Lophophaps]

Mods are well aware of the spam attacks and that quite a few "members" sneaked past the filter, not approved by mods. Matt is working on code and ways to stop the miscreants, but they keep finding ways around. Some spam is predictable, porn, gambling, hair loss. Some is outright funny, like an artesian bore company in Minsk, a roofing contractor in Flagstaff Arizona, or mangled words generated by a computer. The code I like works in DOS - format c: /u. Nice and simple, no more spam. As soon as the competing priorities are gone there may be a solution. Whiskey is a good solution.

Moderator

[FatCanyoner]

Bots constantly evolve and keep getting better, so while code may help, there will still ne a need for someone to manually go through and delete the spam accounts that sneak through. Many don't post -- I haven't seen much of that getting past moderators -- they just use their account to sneak their links onto the forum.

As can be seen from the link I shared, the number of fake members on this forum number well past a thousand, and make up about half of all accounts registered in the last year. It's an issue that can only be solved by an administrator deleting those accounts.

[Lophophaps]

I know about the bots. For now the competing priorities mean that it will be on the list but nothing can be done for a while. A neat way would be code such that anyone who has joined and not posted is banned. Genuine new starters have their posts read by a moderator, so a registered person with no no posts slipped past the checks.