Depending on the sign-up security, some folks may be signing up with a view to harvesting potential email addresses for mass-mailing. Although our mods do seem to be doing a very effective job of keeping the board on the rails.
Indeed. A while back members were concerned about the number of 'guests' indicated at the foot of the home page, sometimes there would be about 30 of them. They were monitored for a while and sets of similar IP addresses were observed as frequent guests. These were assumed to be computer guests and not real people, possibly, as Kitty suggests getting data on members or maybe were just google-type search-engine tools. Anyway those series of IP addresses were banned so we no longer have inflated guest lists.
The forum has a tool which logs how often banned posters or banned guests try to visit. Those banned sets of IP addresses have now logged up about 13,000 attempts to visit which I think confirms they are not real people.
