Fake forum members/posts etc

[Alex P]

I bought a forum a while back, quite popular back in the day anyway I knew something was fishy back when I used to be a normal member on it so over the past few days ive been digging up old threads form the archive and putting them in the right sections etc etc taken me hours so far and I decided to look thought the user list to see how many members have made at least 1 post and I was intrigued to see a lot of users with the email sign up email address so I go search the email to see to what extent this went onto, I found 5.7k users signed up all with 0 posts, obviously not real people and it got me thinking if I ever would do that my self, ive set up many forums before and never done such a thing because I feel its cheating your self out of what you have built but at the same time I guess it motivates the current members to keep with the forum as it looks like its doing well.

Do you think its right, or a option to make fake users or fake posts in order to make your forums look more popular or in order to gain fake statistics?

 

[Skinny]

well i think its wrong to create fake users and fake posts so you can drive the price of a forum higher. That is wrong.

Some forum owners do use services that create users and posts to generate more interaction between the other members and (hopefully) amp up the activity of the forum and slowly draw more people to it and make it "the spot".

This isn't so bad because while fake they are trying to get the forum they own to be better or more active.

But selling a forum with the majority of users being fake is just wrong.

That's something I guess you need to be leery of when purchasing a forum and do your homework.

Skinny

 

[Alex P]

Well it doesn't bother me at all that the amount of users that I found were fake, the forum I bought is were I originally found my love for forums so its more of a memory kept going than a investment :P

But yes I don't agree with it

 

[alexe]

Well it doesn't bother me at all that the amount of users that I found were fake, the forum I bought is were I originally found my love for forums so its more of a memory kept going than a investment :P

But yes I don't agree with it

it could be a spam a bot - i had 1k sign ups in a night before by the same spam bot, it broke the capchas and everything

 

[Alex P]

ForumGuru.net || Your Source For Your Forum Needs One of my bot pools aha XD

Maybe it was, you could be right.

 

[dezinerite]

I agree with Skinny on this one. It's normal for forum owners to do that just to get the ball rolling. But THOUSANDS of fake members? Wow, that is a lot!!! Most likely forum bots.

But as a forum owner myself, I do get lots of "0 post" sign ups and I'm using anti-spam mods + manually checking new registrations. Perhaps some of these 0 post sign ups are valid? I've joined forums that I've never posted in.

I don't see having fake members as unethical. It's a simple marketing method that works with visitor psychology and increases their chances of signing up. On the hand I don't think it makes that much of a difference. It only speeds things up a bit at the beginning.

 

[Martic]

5.7k is a bit too much. Good God... who was making all of these?

 

[Alex P]

5.7k is a bit too much. Good God... who was making all of these?

Well ill never know, im kind of 50/50 on whether to prune them or not, the members will probably notice 5k people missing aha.