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[My Name is Immaterial]

Really, there was a crazy members-online jump back in late 2010? What happened back there?

December 8th, 2010 is still a mystery to me, however.

[Haspen]

According to devlog, that day Toady posted a bunch FotF reply links... and that's it v:

[My Name is Immaterial]

Added to the OP. Thank you.

[Glloyd]

What I'm getting is that due to the lack of a new release, there are less new members joining, and less new topics made. In addition, the amount of new members in 2012 may have something to due with all the press coverage of DF at the time, including the MoMA stuff. Members online is mostly steady, with brief spikes around releases. In addition, the amount of posts per month is experiencing a steady increase over time, tripling since the start of 2009.

[My Name is Immaterial]

That's the same impression I had. I suspect that we are becoming a smaller but more active forum.

[Toady One]

Starting in roughly 2014 we changed how members were registered because of the love bots -- about 2/3rds (very approximately) of the signups before then starting especially around 2011 were spammers.  Now they only get in every once in a while.  I'm still cleaning that up (I've deleted at least ten thousand accounts over the last couple years, and there's a lot left to go).  So total member counts are basically useless, though members online isn't really affected by spammers (except maybe that weird day).  As far as I can tell, the actual-people membership slowly increases, as does the people online, with the release spikes.  Everything else seems to track with that as well, though I haven't done much with it.

[My Name is Immaterial]

That's actually really interesting. Thanks!

[Xantalos]

Its less FG and more RP, actually. Realm of the mad god Rise of the magic girls has a ridiculous amount of posts for something that isn't a huge rtd or in general discussion, it has somewhere in the rage of 40-50% of the posts the happy thread has according the the bars in the stats center.

It's stupid huge.
Like the primary reason I'm not second highest post count on the forum right now huge.

I vary my FG&RP steroids.

[Loud Whispers]

Starting in roughly 2014 we changed how members were registered because of the love bots -- about 2/3rds (very approximately) of the signups before then starting especially around 2011 were spammers.  Now they only get in every once in a while.  I'm still cleaning that up (I've deleted at least ten thousand accounts over the last couple years, and there's a lot left to go).  So total member counts are basically useless, though members online isn't really affected by spammers (except maybe that weird day).  As far as I can tell, the actual-people membership slowly increases, as does the people online, with the release spikes.  Everything else seems to track with that as well, though I haven't done much with it.

Christ, how do you even find that many bots?

[hops]

Sweet! I don't normally have time to check the stats since I'm usually only just refreshing some certain people's post history obsessively.

[i2amroy]

Christ, how do you even find that many bots?

It was pretty bad for a while. (And it wasn't helped that a fair share of the bots/bot-people would sign-up, and then wait for quite a while before actually posting anything).

IIRC it messed with the male:female report for the stats quite a bit as well. For some reason a huge chunk of the bots were declaring that they were female, and we got almost to a 3:1 male to female ratio for a while.

[Toady One]

The vast (Vast) majority of the bots (or people-bot combos, or zombie crowd-sourced captcha or whatever undead cyborgey thing they are) never post.  They just set their website and/or their signature to link some place and never come back.  Then I get emails from either the person that did it or somebody that ends up with that domain two years later complaining about being black-listed by google and threatening me.  I find the largest groups of them when they fail to vary their IP addresses much.  The forum lets me do searches with IP wildcards, and zero posts, and hasn't logged on for a year, then I feel pretty confident just deleting page after page of random lowercase letter-number user names with the same variants on an email address.

[mastahcheese]

I have a much better question:

How do you find time to work on DF if you have to delete that many spambot accounts!?

From what I understand, he spends the first part of his day at home programming dwarf fortress pretty much with minimal interuption, and then later in the day he goes over to his brother Threetoe's place, and that's when he moderates on the forums, without being distracted by programming.
He just divides up his day, and manages his time really well.

[Muz]

I have a much better question:

How do you find time to work on DF if you have to delete that many spambot accounts!?

Probably wouldn't take long, like mopping the house or doing laundry. When you've deleted a thousand spambots, you learn to delete 10 thousand pretty quick

[i2amroy]

On a slightly related note it appears that the post count for the DF Wiki discussion board is broken. The forum seems convinced that the board only has 3 total posts (despite having 152 topics) and thus anyone who has posted 3+ times in it automatically gets this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)