[ANSWERED] Guess the number of spammers stopped!

[tasadam]

Well the little guessing game has run its course so it's time to share some numbers with you.

The magic number - the number of attempts to join the forum which were automatically blocked by our anti-spam measures, over the first 15 days of the year up until I gathered the data and decided to start this quiz is
4210

And now for some interesting statistics.

The automated anti spam blocking measure was introduced in March 2011, records of spam attempts date back to 10/3/2011.
Prior to this date, all spammers were manually removed from the forum by mods & admins.
From its introduction until the end of 2011 there were 1897 attempts to join which were automatically blocked.
In 2012 the number of attempts was 3744.
In 2013 (up until the time I am writing this - 18 days) the number if attempts was 7221.
So for this year alone, that's one every 3 minutes 25 seconds..

The 17th was a busy day for them, with 1869 attempts just on that day.

And, until recently, the moderation/admin team have been removing many accounts that did get through the blocking but were spammers - roughly 10 a day, added to the stopforumspam database and deleted.

We have been making some big changes to the way accounts are filtered, and this has already shown to have reduced the workload significantly. We're still fine-tuning it, but it was nice to not have to do any administration functions on spammers today.
To the best of my knowledge, the forum is spam-free. But, if anyone sees anything suspicious - please use the report facility so we can deal with them, thanks.

[Turfa]

Thanks to the admins for all your efforts in keeping them out !

[Graham51]

I think that makes STRIDER the winner with his guess of 5217 although ILUVSWTAS mentioned the number 4307 but I don't think that was his guess.

[Strider]

I think that makes STRIDER the winner with his guess of 5217 although ILUVSWTAS mentioned the number 4307 but I don't think that was his guess.

Woohoo! What did I win? Moderator privileges?

[tasadam]

Nah, you were still more than a thousand off...
Amazing how many people out there are trying so hard to perform their cyber-litter on the forums of the world with total disregard for any rules, ethics etc.

New changes introduced mean I have a lot less work to do cleaning them up, which is nice!