Data Recovery Forum Reaches 500 Members

Just want to say welcome and thank you to everyone who has joined up and made this new forum such a success.

yes going well
Would it be possible to remove all the spam accounts? I know it is a bit of a question to remove 0 posts as someone could be lurking, maybe a requirement to say hello, or remove after 3 weeks 0 posts or something?

I suppose I could do that, but it is hard to know for sure who is just an auto generated spam account and who is just reading and not yet contributing.

I've already deleted 150~200 accounts that I could tell were just spammers. But I don't want to unintentionally delete any real user accounts just because they aren't active yet. So I've erred on the side of caution in that regard. One thing I've learned from other forums is that over moderation can really drive away professionals who may have meaningful knowledge to contribute.

I always ban the spammers, maybe delete banned members? I agree it is hard.

I could delete all the banned members, however I think that would allow those user names to become available again. Which means that the same spam bot that created them may come back around and create the same account all over again.

Going forward I do plan to add a question on sign up such as the "what does HDD stand for?" found in hddgruru forum. That should seriously limit the number of new spam accounts being generated. But for now, I think that seeing a higher number of members may actually encourage more legitimate people to join. No one wants to join a community of just a couple members, the number 500 looks pretty good though even if 400 are actually spammers. I seriously doubt that hddguru has 20,000 real members as shown either.

Sounds fair enough!