Fine activity here, thanks to all who contribute. I personally find the forum size just perfect for it's purpose, and apart from the very few skirmishes it's been rolling along nicely (making everybody happy all the time is just impossible, settling for trying to keep most happy most of the time). I'll come back to policy and forum etiquette in another post, after a conference with the 'board of elders'
Running a forum means 2 things, getting members +
avoiding getting members. We could have 10.000's of (unwanted) members, and 100.000's of (unwanted) posts. Spammers, hackers, botnets and other nuisances finds forums so attractive they'll do anything to get a foot in the door, or even hack\destroy it as some kind of sport. Looking trough logs, ban hits and statistics, I'll roughly estimate the number of attempted spamposting (and\or spammer registrations) to add up to around 250.000. Starting to get used to it by now.
Anyway so far so good, apart from a few server problems, things have been going well here. The move to
www.a7a10.net is not scheduled, am slowly planning how to do it.
Current htaccess ip bans is in the millions + many more in the internal forum ban system, to keep out the most bothersome trash from China, Russia, Ukraine etc, where there must be 10.000' of BSA's in existence ):