membership

[Faceting Frank]

Haven't logged in for a while and just noticed they are 42 members awaiting approval?

[MakkyBrown]

They appear quickly sometime, 99% will be spammers. I deleted 150 of them the other day.
MB

[MakkyBrown]

Sorted. Don't worry about the numbers you see there they are mostly just spammers caught via the spam filter. Occasionally I find a legit potential member caught by the filter. I activate their account and email them. Largely the automated forum approval process is working well.

CheersMB

[Faceting Frank]

OK, never realized how much spam there was.

[MakkyBrown]

It is mostly from Russia/Eastern Europe. Hard to fathom why when this forum has so little traffic, maybe it is bots doing it. One thing for sure if we didn't have the spam filter running the forum would be an unusable mess.

MB

[RoughCreations]

I think the forum gets its fair  (albeit modest) share of traffic - about 10,000 unique visitors a month. For many forums these days, converting a reasonable percentage of the traffic into registered members and regular contributors is the hard bit.
The fundamental format and usefulness of internet forums has remained unchanged for so long now, with forums having originated from Bulletin Boards (late 70's !).
Maybe if Mark Zuckerberg continues to tick off enough Facebook/Instagram users with the direction he is taking his social media platforms, some users may return to the forum format with time.

RC

[MakkyBrown]

I think most of those might be from people looking at images where search engines have picked them up. I wonder if we could automatically put a small watermark on the images.MB

[RoughCreations]

I think the traffic stats for the forum are actual PHP page loads (plus spam-bots etc, lol)
I did a search on Google for "Facetron" and "encoder" together and then clicked on the "images" filter in Google Search. Like you, I found ALF images of my machine amongst them. If you click the "Visit" button from the Google search engine results, I think that it is only at this point a PHP page-load occurs, and our number of unique visits increments by one. So, if people are interested in the context of an image they will end up at ALF ultimately. Google just has a cached set of ALF images (stored on Google servers) displayed in its search results that a Google Search Engine Spider picked up a while ago.
My understanding anyhow,
RC