A follow-up to my prior post.

[Steve Ashton]

After I posted this morning about the members list and the spammers on the site, and because I have mentioned the term 'bandwidth' in a few previous posts, my email and PM boxes have been filled with requests for more information.

X Marks is a huge site. If you are in the internet forum business you gauge the size of a forum by the amount of traffic and by its bandwidth or how much traffic a site receives. We all have our sites hosted by some company that has large computers called servers. This is where the actual site is located and where the data is stored. Then as members log on and create posts or upload pictures or embed links the amount of traffic increases. Basically the server computer must work harder to handle this traffic.

A simple google search on the term 'bandwidth' comes up with this;

In website hosting, the term "bandwidth" is often incorrectly used to describe the amount of data transferred to or from the website or server within a prescribed period of time, for example bandwidth consumption accumulated over a month measured in Gigabyte per month. The more accurate phrase used for this meaning of a maximum amount of data transfer each month or given period is monthly data transfer.
Consider this analogy:

• Rented Water Tank = web-server that hosts your website,
• Water company = hosting company where your web-server resides,
• Water = files, data, images, etc. that comprise your website,
• Pipe = the internet,
• Quantity of water delivered = bandwidth consumption,
• You = patron / visitor of your website which is hosted on aforementioned web-server.

There's a pipe that delivers water from your rented water tank to your home. As you request water, the water company delivers it to you. All the while, they are keeping track of how much water was delivered to you, during a billing cycle. You have a contract with the water company in which they agree to charge you a fixed dollar amount per billing cycle, provided you do not request more water than the allowable quantity, as defined in your contract. If you do request more water, they will not deny you ... but you will incur additional charges for the extra water requested / delivered.
With that example in mind, web-pages typically equate to a small quantity of water ... while images, videos, PDFs and other similar media can potentially equate to large quantities of water being delivered by your water company. The accumulated total can grow rather quickly, especially when your website is popular / visited by many people.

There are thousands of forums out there. The largest are forums about computers, gaming, and automobiles. If you discount those types of forums X Marks ranks right up there with the largest forums in the world. In fact I was told by our hosting company that we may be the largest forum in the world about a single, non computer, game or car related topic.

This thing is huge.


Now let's talk about Spam.

Spam is defined as;

The abuse of electronic message systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.
People who create electronic spam are called spammers.

Spamming is rampant on the web because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists. It is also difficult to trace the spanners and hold them accountable for their actions. Spam operations can be single computer users or large 'call center' type operations in areas with little control over internet usage or little legislation regulating it.
Spamming is universally reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many places. It is also very wide spread with hundreds of thousands of spammers operating daily.

This forum attracts spammers in such numbers for a couple of reasons. One because we are so large. Big forums have a larger presence on the web and are therefor easier to find.
The other reason is because in the past we had an absentee owner many spammers just logged on, placed their spam in the user profile and waited. Each of these hidden spammers attracts more spammers.

We currently average between 3 and 20 new registrations each day. Of those two or three are legitimate members who want to join our discussions.
The rest are spammers who only want to put up a link to their porn site or their Viagra selling site and wait for our members to find them and visit.
Some however are active spammers. They actually come onto the forum and insert their stuff into existing threads such as the recent one about 'what's your favorite drink?'.

Our Forum Moderators are always on the lookout for these active spammers. It is one of their responsibilities to find them, and get them off our forum before the general membership even knows that they are there.

We have the forum software set up that each new member should go into a moderation queue to be reviewed by the Moderators before being allowed to post on the open forum. However, spammers are cunning. They find ways past these safeguards and get in despite our best efforts.

If you would like to keep abreast of the new registrations....Every time you log, in look in the right side panel of the portal page of the forum. You will see the newest member. If the Moderators haven't gotten to it yet you may catch a spammer.