User cleanup

[webmistress]

FYI - I deleted about 300 bogus user accounts tonight. I basically cleared out anyone in the database who had a .ru e-mail address or website url, and 90% of the users who had a website listed but had 0 posts. Although I don't think I deleted any legit people (I checked every url that looked like it might be valid), if you got nuked, just create a new account. It shouldn't be a big deal, since you hadn't posted before anyway.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know, so no one was wondering why the user count dropped so dramatically.

[Ysobelle]

SCORE!

I was dreading the "Today's Birthdays" tide of sludge on January 1st.

[webmistress]

BTW - someone had emailed me asking why I didn't implement an image-based authentication process (you know, the annoying "type the letters you see in this image" thing) - and the reason for that is that phpBB is a fscking pain in the ass when it comes to upgrading. You basically lose all of the nifty addons, and you have to put them all back in again - a real task if you have a heavily customized forum like we do.

I'm still on a quest for a forum that doesn't suck. Most of them are "ok", with things I like, and things I really don't like. I had even investigated going with a commercial 3rd party provided like groupee.com, but they want to charge an mind-boggling fee to import all of the posts from phpbb. And it would cost me about $40 a month. I woudl actually be OK with the monthly fee, most likely, but the import fee is just outta control. Plus their rate structure is based on the number of posts, not the number of users, so it would get expensive pretty quickly if we didn't prune the forum, which I choose not to do.