Most Users Ever Question

Anything on your mind that isn't about RLS? It's nice to realize that there is life beyond this disease and have an opportunity to get to know our online family in a different context.
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majoraward
Posts: 274
Joined: Thu Oct 04, 2012 1:36 pm

Most Users Ever Question

Post by majoraward »

What happened on this date to have so many users on the board at same time? Anyone know? I'm just curious. 2006 was when Mirapex was approved for RLS wasn't it, or maybe Requip? I didn't know if it had anything to do with it.

"Most users ever online was 254 on Sun Mar 12, 2006 12:56 pm"

Polar Bear
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Re: Most Users Ever Question

Post by Polar Bear »

I joined at the end of 2006, so wasn't a member at the time.
However, I have noticed this also and have wondered, but I don't know.

I think this was at a time when members could do their own registration and that was changed to the current method of getting an application approved because there was such a difficulty with spammers.
So perhaps it was something to do with spammers........ but don't know.
Betty
https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/a ... 0/fulltext
Opinions presented by Discussion Board Moderators are personal in nature and do not, in any way, represent the opinion of the RLS Foundation

ViewsAskew
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Re: Most Users Ever Question

Post by ViewsAskew »

Spambots.

This was before we had better protections in place. The mods spent an inordinate amount of time just removing spam :-).
Ann - Take what you need, leave the rest

Managing Your RLS

Opinions presented by Discussion Board Moderators are personal in nature and do not, in any way, represent the opinion of the RLS Foundation, and are not medical advice.

majoraward
Posts: 274
Joined: Thu Oct 04, 2012 1:36 pm

Re: Most Users Ever Question

Post by majoraward »

The spambot plague of 2006 :lol: Thanks for answering that! I had a whole bunch of stupid theories but didn't think of it. Yet I had asked a similar question about a year ago at another site where I noticed there were all these new users but they had zero posts, many hundreds of them, and it was the same thing. Not sure of the details of why the accounts are not removed though, I guess I never got around to asking that one :lol:

ViewsAskew
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Re: Most Users Ever Question

Post by ViewsAskew »

At that time, we allowed non-registered people to post as a guest. So, these people weren't even registered! When we switched and made people register, then we had to start removing the spammers. That was lots of fun :-). For awhile, we manually registered EVERY new user - having an email conversation with them to make sure they were human and really wanted to talk about WED and not sex, knockoff purses, or drugs. Eventually, the software got good enough that we, as mods, don't have to do a lot to prevent spammers. Yay!
Ann - Take what you need, leave the rest

Managing Your RLS

Opinions presented by Discussion Board Moderators are personal in nature and do not, in any way, represent the opinion of the RLS Foundation, and are not medical advice.

badnights
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Re: Most Users Ever Question

Post by badnights »

Only last xmas if I recall? There was software that could handle spam registrations long before that, but the Foundation had no one to upgrade the software. It's so much better now! I was only involved with the tail end of the manual registrations. There was a moderate but noticeable surge in registrations once the board was upgraded so that users could register themselves.
Beth - Wishing you a restful sleep tonight
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