Should I delete all the spam accounts?

[jdab]

On one of my forums (well there are some on my others too) there are spambots. These were all banned as fast as possible and the threads were put into a trash can folder.

Do you think I should delete all of the accounts? There are 515 members but 107 of them are banned spam accounts.

 

[pandaa]

Yes, I personally think you should. While 515 members sounds great, I think if you actually get rid of them and the content they made, you'll have a truer representation of how you're doing. 🙂

 

[LiquidServe]

Yes, I personally think you should. While 515 members sounds great, I think if you actually get rid of them and the content they made, you'll have a truer representation of how you're doing. 🙂

It give you the perfect post:member ratio! 😀 I would advise to delete both of them threads as well as members! 😉

 

[jdab]

All the members have been deleted!

 

[Migi]

I agree that spam accounts should be deleted as it is not useful for your member counts. However, in one of the forums I go to, the administrators refused to delete these accounts. Why? They have a duplicate account detector system. This system goes to check for similarities in old spam accounts so new suspicious users can be filtered immediately. And it has proven to be so useful.

So it depends. 😀

 

[thedudeman]

Yeah, I have the IPS anti-spam service, and it bans most of the spambots upon registration. I usually go through and clear them out (delete them), so they no longer appear as registered members, and they don't inflate the user count.

 

[Tucker933]

I personally delete all spam accounts immediately after logging and blocking their IP/Email addresses.
If someone were to go through my user list, I would prefer them to see more active users than not, as well.

 

[forumhookers]

Just trash them away to have a legit stats, They are not useful.

 

[Acorn]

I agree with the deletion. We remove inactive and never or barely used accounts once or twice a year. {If you did a lot of posting on your account we don't delete it.} It saves server space, that's why we do it.

 

[jdab]

I have been banning all the spammers as usual, then once we get to 20 spam users (that's how many users show per page in the groups section in the ACP) I delete them.