My bad math?

[GTRS Fiero]

On the forum stats, it shows 411 members, 5 new members this month, and latest member is psychosurfer.  By my observation, at a minimum the last 2 new members have not increased the total members nor changed the latest member.  Do the new members have to post for those changes to occur, or am I missing something?

[Fierofool]

At the top left you'll see that there 8 members awaiting approval.  Everyone and every robot and spammer that registers will show up in that tally.  Unless approved, that number won't diminish except when Pat deletes them.  Most of those 8 are currently on the Ban List, but still show in the tally of members awaiting approval. 

Once a registration is approved, it shows up at the bottom of the page and stays there until the next registration approval.  psychosurfer was the last one approved.  Prior to that was Harold weeks.  There have been 5 approvals since yours.  One doesn't have to post in order to show up in the members tally.  There are many, many of that 411 who have registered, been approved, but have never posted.  If you were able to go to some pages accessible to the Administrator and Moderators, you would find that there have been over 30,000 attempts to register.  Before Pat initiated the question and answer portion of registration, everything was automatically approved.  You might imagine what got posted.  Just don't type the words so that we get flagged.  Pat changed the board to Pow Web and I think that's what eliminated them. 

[GTRS Fiero]

I must not have the ability to see the members awaiting approval.  Or I'm blind, looking in the wrong place.  I remember seeing Harold Weeks.  I'm just wondering how the members this month has gone up by 2 without changing the total members.  Were these 2 members that got through the validation, but didn't get approved?

There are a lot of members who appear to have posted once or twice and vanished.

Where did we get flagged?  Google?

I gather that there was an old message board.  This board seems to have been started in 8/2008.  I read that messages from the previous board were moved over, but I'm curious if they attached to the original member or not.

[TopNotch]

You can't see members waiting approval because you're not a moderator.
Messages from the old board were not carried over, though some may have been manually copied over. The old board was not hosted "locally", that is, not where the rest of "gafiero.org" was at the time, but somewhere unknown. It was a "service", not not an "application" run on our own website. And I was never given complete control by the previous administrator.
This forum runs on free, open source software from Simple Machines. It works well, and best of all, there are no advertisements to put up with, like on some "service" forums.

[GTRS Fiero]

I appreciate that there are no ads here.  In recignition of that fact, I became a paid member to support this forum.  I do understand that you aren't paid/reimbursed for your work on the site.

I had read the Wiki on the forum software.

Sometimes, due to hosting setups, it's difficult to give admin control to someone for one site, without giving control to other sites.  Or, sometimes the hosting people are lazy and/or don't know what they're doing.

After years of running on-prem mail servers, I've migrated several hundred users to Office 365.  I'd resisted for a while, seeing the problems with hosted ”solutions”, and with Microsoft's ”solution” in particular.  However, the writing was on the wall.  I still have numerous Exchange 2013-2016 servers.  Sure enough, when problems come up on Office 365, things that would have been simple fixes in an on-prem server take weeks with Office 365, simply because I don't have full control, and the morons at ”support” are barely able to read the instructions in their guide, much less fix anything.

I wonder what the content was of the messages that were lost on the old board.

[GTRS Fiero]

Interesting.  I saw a member that appeared to have registered at 3:25am today, but the latest member and total members haven't changed.  Can we see them before they're approved?

[Fierofool]

Yes.  Pat, Ron and I can see their profile when they register.  We review their ISP, hostname, username, email address, country of origin and URL if available.  We can ban them on any combination of those factors or we approve them.  Only when we approve them do they show up at the bottom as the latest member.  At the top left there are currently 11 awaiting approval.  Some have already been banned.  They will continue to show until Pat moves them permanently to the banned roster.  There are currently over 30,000 on that roster.  Most were robot registrations running sequential usernames or ISP's.  We can ban on a number of factors and if they change all but 1 of those factors, they still can't get through to register again.  That was why I didn't ban your second registration when you were having access issues.