August UpdateI haven't provided an update in a while. Summer is a time to be outdoors and I suspect many of us are trying to enjoy not shoveling snow for these short few months. During the course of starting this website and now developing and maintaining it, I have been very surprised to learn that much of my time would be spent dealing with spammers trying to register on the site. I have had about 2400 attempts from spammers to register on the site. Each one has to be weeded off one at a time. So, the ratio of legitimate registration requests to spammers is about 1 to 24. For many of the spammers, rejecting their request is not too time consuming. What is time consuming is separating some of the legitimate requests from the spammer requests. The majority are obvious. E-mail addresses that contain sexual connotations or long e-mail addresses that are a series of nonsensical letters, etc. are strong indicators of a spammer. But, there are a significant number of requests where it is not obvious which category the registrant falls in. In these cases I need to send an e-mail to the registrant and ask that they respond with their interest in the subject matter of the website. Spammers never reply back (that's because nearly all spammer registration requests are generated by automated computer programs that seek out websites and generate automated registration requests). So, if you are someone who wants to join the site, it really is best to send me an e-mail and let me know you have either sent the request in, or our planning to do so.
Happy collecting! Steve |
