newkidontheblock wrote: ↑Thu Sep 14, 2023 11:19 pm This means there’s lots of lurkers. Most are too scared to post their thoughts and ideas for fear of being ridiculed and crushed.

The challenge is how to convert all those lurkers into active participants?

I don't know about that. I doubt there are that many people in the world interested. There are some poor lambs who might be put off, but most adults can handle a bit of banter. Besides that, if there were thousands of members posting here regularly it would become an unmanageable melange from hell.

Only 910 guests at 11.47 today...what happened?

Nope, the figure on the front page is 14241 right now.

Haha, we're paying for money for a bot farm in the Philippines to read every post, so please continue to give them interesting things to read so that they don't get bored and walk out. Actually, I have a feeling it might be caused from when we were offline a few hours earlier, and I started clicking anything and everything, toggling things off and on, in an attempt to see if it would magically turn back on. One thing I did was request that the entire site cache be reindexed, and I have a feeling some crawlers (bots) are working overtime right now, recrawling every page. I did that before UT made me take a chill pill and started taking logical steps to figure it out, but by that time I had already requested everything be recrawled.

It might be several days until it goes back to normal, so expect it to go wildly up and down for a while.

Out of interest, has there been any notable increase in site/member registrations?
Another forum I’m involved with had a sizeable online viewers stat a long time back. Around the same time, there was a large number of recent registrations, but very few of those new members posted anything. Following that, nestled in among batches of registrations within a similar timeframe, were several dormant ghost posters- the sort that make throw away comments on a variety of irrelevant topics “my mate on quota had that” type shite. But generally inoffensive tripe spread over a few weeks.
Magically, they achieve the minimum post count to be able to send PMs, access specific user areas, and then the spamming starts.

Anything from Chinese automotive test equipment which would be totally useless when applied to 1980s sports cars, to a battery of dubious oil products sales vouchers, all the way to dildo’s of varying description.
Some of this traffic being so prolific that it crashed the server on which the forum sat, and filled up message boxes. But it was hard to distinguish many of the occasional posters that actually used the forum honestly (but just weren’t internet types) from the spammers, because things like trusted email domains were similar.

Nothing out of the ordinary lately.

We get those too, but most never see the light of day. If you're ever looking for construction supply companies/venders in China, all of us on the CEO moderators team could give you 100 recommendations each.

I don't recall seeing any spammers selling dildos, lol, but if I do I might just have to let it slip through.

Freightdog wrote: ↑Fri Sep 15, 2023 12:34 pm Out of interest, has there been any notable increase in site/member registrations?

No. That only happens when Cam Nivag gets bored.

Username Taken wrote: ↑Fri Sep 15, 2023 1:07 pm

Freightdog wrote: ↑Fri Sep 15, 2023 12:34 pm Out of interest, has there been any notable increase in site/member registrations?

No. That only happens when Cam Nivag gets bored.

I thought he was constantly bored?