Membership Count

[Boston Bob]

We are showing 353 as the membership count. Before we changed formats it was over 800. What Happened????

Boston Bob

[paul]

Good question. Early in the life of this forum we were getting hit by spamming bots, posting ads for adult web sites and other highly inappropriate stuff. The bots would find the forum, register (yes, even getting through the "type the code you see in this image" step meant to keep only humans registering), post garbage, and never come back. Evidently the bots had been designed to get through the registration process on phpBB systems. We were getting several new bots every day and that was artificially inflating the number of members and posts. I always erased those posts, and eventually I altered the sign-in process so you had to type in the code from the image backwards. The bots weren't flexible or smart enough to follow instructions - they just new what steps to do to register on a standard phpBB forum, so that put an end to the spamming.

The recent update of the forum was a move from version 2 to version 3 of phpBB, and it seems to be much more secure. So far I don't think we've had any spam-bots get through. I wouldn't be surprised if the process of importing all the data from the old forum to the new one automatically skipped all old user IDs that had no posts on the system, which would include all the bots since their posts had been manually deleted. That's one possible explanation, at least.

Tight lines,

Paul

[barrycuda]

Like most forums as well, you get those people that read, yet do not post.

Of late I admit to being one of these, I first purchased RWFF last year, but simply never seemed to have time to myself to actually enjoy it past the first month.

My personal circumstances have now altered and this year I have spent time fishing and not enough time posting!

The variety of sites to fish is simply brilliant, last night I fished the River Moerrum (apologies if my spelling is incorrect) for the first time, where I was rewarded with a 34'' sea trout, as well as a couple of pike.
To all those that people that create venues and flies for our enjoyment, I take my hat off to you and say a huge thank you!

It is my intention to read the development threads more, and hopefully add some of my own content to give something back. There may be a lot of questions asked though.