Good evening everyone,
Wanted to drop you all a quick note to make you aware of some recent action on the forum. This shouldn’t impact any of our regular users, but I wanted to keep you up to date.
Throughout the evening, I have been manually removing accounts in our database which had been banned for violations of our policies prohibiting spam and advertising on the forums. Our moderation tools actively filter these accounts so we are able to add them quickly to our ban list - therefore, as they sat before tonight, they posed no further harm to our forums.
That said, we believe that the remains of these accounts have no place in our community, so the decision was made to remove them. What does this mean for our users? Here are a few important notes:
- You may notice a significant decrease in the Member count for the forums. Approximately 300 accounts were removed. This is not a loss in active members - all accounts removed had 0 approved posts - and will not result in a decrease in legitimate forum membership.
- Only accounts marked for a violation of Rule P6 (our spam policy) were removed. You may still see accounts in the Banned Users group - no decision has been reached yet regarding the long-term handling of these accounts.
- Precautions were taken to ensure only banned, inactive accounts were removed. However, it is possible an error may have occurred. If you find yourself unable to log into your account, please re-register and contact us. We will check our records against the accounts that were removed, and if your original account is found to still be active, we will work to restore your access. We are unable to restore deleted accounts, and sincerely apologize if any errors were made.
Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you!
Nick
