Consider this my only significant contribution to the case against Adam Dicker...
So, how did DNF get 125185 new members in one day in May of this year?
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So to put the idea that DNF had inflated numbers to bed, here's what I know.
I believe we had users in a group that were not showing in the overall user count so they were moved to a group that would show them. We certainly did not have 125,000 users sign up that day nor did I or anyone on staff type them all in manually. I hope that helps.
Allow me to first disclose that I own an established internet forum on advanced software so I am familiar with forum back ends. Invision, the software that I also use, also has a system of 'user groups' and 'permissions'.
Let me explain that I haven't simply done this to prove Adam Dicker to be a liar, as that wouldn't be a productive use of my time, I also own the domain motorforum.co.uk (you can verify that by looking at the whois details) and I've been considering looking into xenforo should I decide to build that out.
A fellow namepros user was kind enough to allow me admin access to look at the backend of his fresh xenforo install. It appears to be the exact software version being used by DNF. I've just spent over an hour looking through every single page under options, as well as 'applications', and 'tools', and could find no settings for the standard statistics module which would allow me to count or discount members from a specific user group.
I also played with user groups. I could find no means of discounting any specific user group from the member count.
The ONLY way I could see to reduce and subsequently increase the member count is to ban a user and then unban that user, in which case they go into the 'Banned Users' group - the one user group which doesn't show in the member count. Even that appears to require a cache being cleared or a rebuild/recount to impact on the member count.
Furthermore, I contacted a programmer who I know through the invision community who sold me a plugin for an old version of invision. I did so because I know he also codes his plugins for the xenforo platform. He also could not think of any backend settings which would exclude a member from the member count, apart from the banned user group.
Then you get the possibility that there was a bug or glitch in the software which was causing incorrect member counts to be displayed. Only, a thorough search of the xenforo support topics do not provide any evidence that this is a problem experienced by any other user.
I am open to Adam Dicker giving me a more thorough step-by-step explanation which shows me precisely how it is that a user group was excluded from the member count, and if he can do that I will log back in and attempt to replicate the issue again.
As things stand the only possibilities appear to be one of these:
- There were 125,000 banned users of dnf who were all unbanned on the same day.
- The membership statistics were purposely falsified in some way, via custom programming or a third party plugin/script.
Either of those scenarios bring about some serious ethical questions. I'm sure I'm not alone in considering option 2 to be the more likely scenario.
Like I said, I'm open to Adam Dicker proving that there is a setting in the backend which could exclude a user group from the member count which I could subsequently attempt to replicate, or an explanation as to why he unbanned 125,000 members in one day, but I'm not hopeful that I'd get one.
As things stand this completely rules out any possibility of me ever joining that forum, and I'm sure it will influence the decision of some others too. I wouldn't sign up to a forum owned by somebody who cannot be trusted to be honest, and in the unlikely event that scenario 1 happened here, I wouldn't want to share a forum with 125,000 people who were deemed dodgy enough to warrant a banning in the past.
