Evenin San, Psy!
Psy, only inactive accounts (old accounts with no posts whatsoever) stand to be erased. Anyone with 1 post or more is deemed active, even if they regged in 2002. Not sure why people register and don't post? You don't even need to reg to search.
But the reason being, had an influx of bots registering recently for: 1) spamming the board (the only reason they didn't visually spam all over the place was due to us switching to manual activation until I figured out how to squish them to pulp automatically), and 2) professional spammers/robots creating loads of accounts just to tag their website to the account profiles - Google/Yahoo search spiders read user profiles, so if the spammers crawl the web and do this on countless forums it boosts their search rankings.
Increased security 14 days ago now, and the logs show that 1800 attempted bots have been stopped from registering here in that period.
They call it "
Search Engine Optimisation". I call it spamming of the highest order. Either way this is the newest technique spammers are using to increase their site rankings and is big business, hence the recent sudden influx.
All contained now though, and everything's back on automatic, thankfully. (Was fucking mind-numbingly boring sifting through them all looking for legit registrants!!).
The purge is to rid previous bot accounts and other inactive accounts with 0 posts, to tidy things up again.
Happy festivities, gents!