Good afternoon, everyone.

As some of you noticed, we gained our one thousandth member yesterday, following the forum's creation in August 2012. Although perhaps only a tenth regularly contribute on the forums, I'm sure you'll agree this is a fantastic achievement for any forum and one which we should mark.

Liam started to record the site's statistics with Google Analytics from 1 January 2013. Since then, we've had a massive seven million pageviews. This site has gone from strength to strength, and is still growing to this day. The site and its forums have overcome the negative reputation they were first given by sceptical enthusiasts, and is now a very valuable source of information for all enthusiasts both in and outside of the North East region.

As ever, we're continuing to work on developing new features and improving existing features. When things quieten down for myself next month, I'll be sure to provide regular updates on some of the things going on behind the scenes.

Stay tuned!

Quick question, when spam accounts are created (and later deleted), how does that affect the member count? Common sense dictates that once a member is deleted the member count will decrease but is that actually the case?

(17 May 2015, 9:52 pm)MurdnunoC wrote Quick question, when spam accounts are created (and later deleted), how does that affect the member count? Common sense dictates that once a member is deleted the member count will decrease but is that actually the case?

When we had a large number of spam accounts joining, these were all manually removed opposed to using the system's method of 'purging' spammers. With the latter, all posts are removed and the account is banned, and as such isn't deleted.

As such, we decided to instead have periodical 'clearouts' to remove all members who haven't posted within x amount of time. The issue with that is that there are a large number of people who don't post anything and just read, making it difficult to set a timeframe. Regularly had people e-mailing to query why their account had been deleted - whoops..!

(18 May 2015, 4:38 am)Dan wrote When we had a large number of spam accounts joining, these were all manually removed opposed to using the system's method of 'purging' spammers. With the latter, all posts are removed and the account is banned, and as such isn't deleted.

As such, we decided to instead have periodical 'clearouts' to remove all members who haven't posted within x amount of time. The issue with that is that there are a large number of people who don't post anything and just read, making it difficult to set a timeframe. Regularly had people e-mailing to query why their account had been deleted - whoops..!

Could you not do it based on when they were last online.