Not VDV related website comment.

[Semper Vaporo]

I regularly visit a couple of web forums that use the same phpBB forum software like this VDV product forum does. But the other forum does not have near the number of oddball member names (Yes, mine is quite out of the ordinary, but at least it is pronounceable and has meaning in Latin!) as this one does. The other forum has no problems with spam advertising or obscene postings, either.

In looking through the list of "members" here, I would hazard a guess that of the 7105 members that are in the list right now, fully 2/3rds to 3/4ths are not in the least interested in the VDV product or video surveillance in any way (Whoops, make that 7107 as two more signed-up while I was writing that sentence). They seem to be here just to get their pharmaceutical/porn/designer-handbag website address in the list of members for advertising and to use the "social contacts" features of the software to contact each other.

The other forum seems to have disabled the "ICQ", "AIM" and other social contacting methods in forum the software and while there are some oddball user names, they do (like mine) have more meaning per the focus of that forum and there are NONE that have listed any "Interests" other than the focus of that forum.

As a measure of the number of people that have a true interest in the focus of the forum, that other site seems to have a better handle of site usage for the site's intended purpose. The other forum has been around longer than this one and has only 434 members and nearly all of them have been active (and on topic) during the forum's lifetime.

Another forum (I used to visit and contribute to regularly) actually had to shut down because the owner could not keep up with eliminating the unwanted postings.

I would like to suggest that the "social contacts" features on this forum be disabled too.

[ryan]

Hiya Semper,

I haven't really been worried about the user count as accounts auto-generated by spam bots cannot ever post, and are not noticeable unless one actually pokes through the member list seeking them out.

I can investigate disabling some of the profile fields if these are troublesome, but the forum software itself does not support this so it may be some time before I can get to it.

Thanks,
- ryan