I hope you all know that we think a TON of you would make great mods, but we just want to keep the numbers fairly small to start out with and see how it goes from there There's been trouble in the past where we've appointed a whole bucket-load of new people and three-quarters of them disappeared, leaving us with a bunch of rainbow stars on the member list who didn't actually do any rainbow-star-work. Quite discouraging.

But yeah, with new active staff members, we'll be able to get a lot more done around here, and much faster It's going to be awesome. Cheers guys!

_________________

You've done a great job choosing them Arwen Some of them were expected, some were unexpected, but they're all really great choices

_________________


by Lembas

_________________




^ By me and my SS *squiggle hugs*

Hey hey! Congrats to the new mods! I'm sure you will be awesome!

_________________
going on a journey through my old claims

Congratulations to the new mods! Those rainbow stars are pretty.

This is such a large community, I am sure there is much more responsibility than the forum I mod at. All the more awesome!!!

_________________


Graphics by me, Daenerys banner by Moist von Lipwig!

Conga-rats to the new mods! Have fun, and hopefully there wont be anyone for you to worry about!

Oh, by the way, do Spammers EVER sign up here? If they do, do you just delete straight away? I guess what I'm trying to say is how do you get so many LotR fans and "clean" members to sign up? Maybe this question doesn't really belong here, but just throwing it out here. *throw*

_________________
AKA Crutchie


Click here to visit my site!

Arwen did a great job deleting all the spam accounts. There were a ton, but she did a clean-up a little while back, and at the same time changed the sign up system to keep them out

_________________


by Lembas

Thanks guys.

We used to have literally thousands of spambots signing up every day but like Ana said Arwen recently cleared the forum and installed a new spam filter, which apparently is working well.
So all the existing accounts should be 'real' people. The forum has been around for a long time though and while the LotR craze died out it seems like many of the members have moved on or forgotten about the place so a lot of them aren't active anymore. But we do experience returning members from time to time.. and perhaps even more will come skipping back when the Hobbit becomes the talk of the town for real.

_________________
>>Be the change you wish to see in the world<<



Banner credit: Shadowcat & Nurrantiel Mashiara

Well, we've rarely had a problem with actual people joining and being creepers, but like Ana and Ea said, we had an enormous problem with automated spam accounts joining. We had something like 18,000 members at one point, and only maybe 1500 of them were real members So I cleared them out a couple months ago, and now we have a registration setting that requires new users to sort the LotR characters out from a list of non-LotR characters. It's easy-peasy stuff for anyone who's even just seen the movies, but apparently spammers don't know that Henry VIII is NOT a Tolkien character It's working great so far, so fingers crossed that it stays that way! This way we've also been able to have user activation rather than admin activation, so no one has to wait for a moderator or me to activate their account before starting to post

_________________

I know I'll sound like Eä when I say this, but I wish I could "like" your post, Arwen. The new system sounds ingenious! [Just the fact that we have user activation now sounds like it'll make things a lot smoother for new members!]