Will we hit 200 active members by the New Year?

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InsaneAstroBoyLover
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Postby InsaneAstroBoyLover » 13 years ago

We can do it! I know it.

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AprilSeven
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WE'VE PASSED 300!

Postby AprilSeven » 13 years ago

Okay, dear moderators, is this POSSIBLE? We've almost double the number of Active Members in a little under 2 weeks?

Does this happen over the Christmas/New Years Holiday Season?

I am amazed and very pleased and hope our forum continues to grow and generate more and more interest!

WELCOME ONE AND ALL!!
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Black Rabbit
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Postby Black Rabbit » 13 years ago

Oh my god, has anyone noticed how many new member there have been lately?! I don't understand it. There are already 400+ active members. :O Wonder why there's been a sudden spike in the amount of new members...?
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Astro Forever
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Postby Astro Forever » 13 years ago

As I said earlier in this thread, there are a lot of spammers. If you want to guess how many, just look at the member's profile of the members who are in the "currently active user list". Thanks to Vergere's robot, very little gets through on the forum because they get banned as soon as they are recognized. :)

It is really appreciated when the members hit the report post button to notify us! :)

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AprilSeven
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Postby AprilSeven » 13 years ago

You all do an amazing job. BTW -- what is the "history" of this site?? How did it come to be, and how is it funded? I mean, there are no ads . . . no membership fees . . . it's like . . . a GIFT or something? I LOVE this place, but maybe we all kind of take it for granted sometimes. :blush:

Wait!! I know!! Dr. Tezuka isn't really dead, he's living in Australia, and he's really running the site. :whistling:

Seriously, though . . . what is the story behind astroboy-online?
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atoms_gf
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Postby atoms_gf » 13 years ago

i have no idea. but there are other sites like this just not as popular..or fast and their still powered by Vbulliten.
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Astro Forever
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Postby Astro Forever » 13 years ago

"AprilSeven" wrote:Seriously, though . . . what is the story behind astroboy-online?

If you browse through the site, in the title bar, it says "Since 1998". I visited the site around that time back then. There was no forum, I remember the background being black, and we were greeted on the site by a .wav file of Astro saying "Hi! My name is Astro!" (that was taken from the 1980 episode "The Crystal Castle"). That was in the dialup era, so that .wav file took a long time to load! :lol:

It wasn't on astroboy-online yet, it was on one of those many free hosts. The site was in my bookmarks but one day (I don't remember when), I noticed the link was broken. I don't know if the site was moved here right away or if it took some time until it became what it is now. All I know is that in 2005, I was surprised to see an Astro Boy episode on TV. I had no clue that there would be a new series in that decade! :lol: It was at that time that I found the site again, with an active forum.

The oldest posts on the forum are from 2003, so I missed some time. All I know is that when I joined the forum, there was a single moderator who I have never seen online, and the administrator wasn't around often (he would come to delete the spam, we hadn't as much spam as we have now). It's amazing that the forum remained active and interesting for so long despite the total lack of control back then. It wasn't perfect and we were trying to discipline ourselves. I've seen other forums in a similar situation go terribly wrong after a few weeks or months to the point that I can't see who would have wanted to stick around. Then, one year or so after I arrived, in 2006, the forum got hacked and the hacker started deleting many many threads! Some of us were about to get together and buy a new astroboy domain name, but one of us managed to reach Mark. Mark came back, managed to recover the missing threads from a backup, then upgraded the forum to vBulletin to keep it safer, and finally chose some moderators.

While we manage the day to day activity, Mark is the only one who's paying. He has the final word over the rules, but we ask him questions from time to time when we're not sure. After all, it's still his site even if he isn't around much.

Others may be able to fill the gap in what I know of the site history.

ETA: I should add that I believe that Mark not only pays for the domain name, hosting and bandwidth, but I don't think vBulletin is free, unlike phpBB.
Last edited by Astro Forever on Sat Jan 08, 2011 1:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Vergere
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Postby Vergere » 13 years ago

I'm sad to say that Astro Forever is right: most of the active users are in fact spammers that registered during the last month. The rate of new spammers has moved a lot during the recent years, and has risen significantly during last November, which is probably why AprilSeven says that the active users have been increasing during this time. Since a little less than a week, we are being heavily attacked by a very aggressive botnet, which explains why the active users have more than doubled in a few days.

On the other hand, new users have been arriving at a rather constant pace since years, and the rate hasn't increased nor decreased significantly recently.

As for AprilSeven's question about why we got 560 users one day, it is the remnants of the last attack of the same botnet in October 2008.

So, sorry AprilSeven: no need to find what is attracting new users here, it was only random attacks by spammers. :(
Restless guardian of this forum.

Despair spammer ye who enter here.

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AprilSeven
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Postby AprilSeven » 13 years ago

Thanks Vergere and Astro Forever . . . so this is really a labor of love and Mark's generosity. That is VERY COOL, and I'm grateful you've been able to protect the site from major harm (I've noticed recently that Vergere is frequently at work at the Administration panel!).

It's incredible how often sites are hit. I work for part of Cornell University, and it's impressive how hard they work to keep everything up and running. Even so, the server for about 60 local websites got hit really bad - it took MONTHS to get everyone back to normal, so you are really to be commended! (BTW Vergere's avatar -- Kerberos the 3-headed dog guardian-- used to be Cornell's symbol for their login program. EXCEPT YOU MADE HIM OUT OF JUMP!!! I got a kick out of that!:lol :)

Hey, it was kinda fun to see the numbers go up, but I figured it had to be something fishy when I didn't see THAT many new additions to the posts. We did gain a few, though -- I think almost a dozen new people who've posted a few times since joining.

Thanks for sharing the background of the forum - very interesting stuff!!
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Ghost
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Postby Ghost » 13 years ago

"Vergere" wrote:I'm sad to say that Astro Forever is right: most of the active users are in fact spammers that registered during the last month. The rate of new spammers has moved a lot during the recent years, and has risen significantly during last November, which is probably why AprilSeven says that the active users have been increasing during this time. Since a little less than a week, we are being heavily attacked by a very aggressive botnet, which explains why the active users have more than doubled in a few days.

On the other hand, new users have been arriving at a rather constant pace since years, and the rate hasn't increased nor decreased significantly recently.

As for AprilSeven's question about why we got 560 users one day, it is the remnants of the last attack of the same botnet in October 2008.

So, sorry AprilSeven: no need to find what is attracting new users here, it was only random attacks by spammers. :(


That would explain a lot. It's really easy to notice that this forum gets a lot of spammers, I think it's crazy that you ban and remove their posts as quickly as you do.

This might seem like a stupid question but how often do you have to deal with trolls. (people who just post rude comments and are just there to get a reaction out of people)


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