Gentlemen, how have you all been? 

I login from time to time whenever I can.

The problem with that, is that Tor assigns a completely random, ever changing IP.  Logging in from multiple IP's would flag your account as suspicious and Emi would investigate it.  Same argument with Proxies, although using a proxy is easier to detect.

3,

I say that, to prevent deleting of posts, that we quote the post before us from now on.

7.

So who is going to be the troll this time?

Hey Remfer,

Its been an exceptionally long time, I don't know if you will see this but regardless, it was nice seeing you around again.

Stay Safe,
SnipeDragon

Greetings Everyone,

Its been a while since I've posted and even longer since I've done anything constructive for the community.  After seeing the level that the bot problem has climbed too, I have temporarily shut off new member registration and will be going through and deleted every member that has 0 posts which has not logged in since their account creation date for the last year or so.  I won't delete any member with a low ID, now will I delete any member with posts.

Since the KeyCAPTCHA system obviously isn't working, I will try to revert the forums back to the built-in CAPTCHA system, on the 'High Security' setting this time, I will also run my own bots against it to see how they fare.  If you have any questions please reply to this topic and I will get back with you ASAP.

-SnipeDragon

UPDATE: Re-opened until I wake up in the morning to finish the job.  Here are some interesting statistics about the deletions I just performed --

3112 Members Deleted
15/3112 Members had logged in after the day they were registered.
4/15 Members had posts or a unique Avatar (instead of just pulling Emi's Avatar)

Thats a little over 100 pages of the members that we had out of the 517 that we had when I started these deletions.  If I remember properly, the last time I checked the members list before all these bots started joining, we were at just under 100 pages, I estimate that when this is all said and done we will probably be back down to around 125 pages of members (at 30 on a page)

rofl, Did you really ToM?

Anyways, as for advertising, I think that if Emi took the money he usually spends on round winners for a few rounds (or maybe even just 2) and used it in some targeted, Pay-per-click advertising on places like Facebook and other gaming sites, that we could see a surge of new players.. that would of course also rely on current players not complaining about a lack of monetary reward for winning in 2 rounds or so.  Ideas?

-Snipe

No, thank you for posting this properly in the Whatever section. o:

*sniffs*

They grow up so fast.

I agree,

I have personally offered to help a few times in the past with the PHP/MySQL work involved and would honestly not mind doing so now either, I would be more than willing to even sign a Non-Disclosure/Privacy Agreement if would would make Emi feel better with me doing so.

Please add me to the list of Collective Names, with my offer to help etc.

Thanks,
SnipeDragon

I'm not FTP but..

Respect Spayed or my ban hammer will smash your face

Not really, but.. on topic, I agree with the idea of the rewards fluctuating based on the active players in each particular round.

Yeah.. they try anyways.. but even a stupid monkey learns after a few times.. *wonders why FTP still tries after all these years*

I mean, even if they succeed, I pop right back up and I promise that my ban hammer hurts a lot more than yours

This topic has been moved to Whatever.

http://forum.spaceo.net/index.php?topic=7580.0

Now that this has been moved almost completely off topic, thanks in part to me but also thanks to everyone else.. *pssst, this is where you all take a bow* I am moving this post to the Whatever boards.

As to giving hugs instead of bans, I tried that once and all I got out of it was finding myself sued and I somehow ended up with some yet-to-be discovered or named disease.. I think I'm going to call it 'Trollitis' as until it went away, I had the distinct urge to troll everything that moved.

Thank you FTP, you are correct.

I read his new post first and it is an opinion post, I wasn't going to punish him for that.  However his behavior since he lost his position has been getting worse and worse to the point where his 'Triple Posting' was taken not as a joke, which it wasn't meant to be, but as a blatant disregard for the rules.

Being a former moderator, his behavior is inexcusable as of late, its been steadily progressing since he returned and has worked its way to the point where it is now, a ban.