Another member cull, coming soon

[IBBoard]

I've just looked at our members list and it looks like we've got a lot of "sleeper" spammers. One day this week (I hope) I'll go through the list, email everyone with 0 posts and warn them that their account will be deleted. They'll all be welcome back if they're just lurkers, but I suspect 90% of them or more are "sleeper spammers" - accounts that signed up and just never spammed. That should kill over 100 accounts by my guess.

[snowblizz]

Just remember I'm not a spammer-bot. Unless I'm the most excellent AI written to date. But if I was I expect I'd be much better at programming than I am and a real asset to the project.

[IBBoard]

Any programming help is useful, and you've done some good work in the community and suggestions aspects as well. The project is just so big already that I can't do everything I want to as quickly as I want to. Your code has generally been good as well, even if you are disadvantaged by learning the mess of the API and C#

The cull is going to be all accounts on 0 posts who haven't visited recently. Those who are obvious spammers will be deleted without recourse (generally those with a spam homepage in their profile, or those whose IP is in the StopForumSpam.com database). Those who might have just signed up and forgotten will get an email warning first.

[IBBoard]

Okay, the notifications have gone out to everyone with 0 posts and no recent activity. I'll probably delete the accounts next weekend.

I've already culled all of the obvious spammers (those with signature spam and those listed in the StopForumSpam.com database). I'm also culling anyone whose email bounces (two so far in the first two minutes after sending the emails).

[IBBoard]

Okay, cull complete. We're now 61 members lighter (the ones who hadn't posted). We've still got a lot of "unused" accounts, but they'll stay for now (180+ members, of which about 10% have visited since November compared to 66% who haven't even visited this year!)