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[Jk]

Hello Bernie, I can understand what you are saying, but most of the people that are viewing from round the world are the once we don't want, and you can't expect Gerald to sit at his computer all day and keep deleting all the mad guys that keep trying to give the site a bad name, that's not what we want. The new members that Gerald has let in I yet have to see a post from them.

I have just looked and the number of members we have at this moment 43 have not made a post and 26 have only made 1.
Gerald has done the right thing and we must accept that.

[Gerald Lawrence]

That's funny, John, I was just counting up the numbers of posters while you were posting your message

Sadly, you are right - there are 40% of our members who have never posted a single item. While it does no harm, and it would be foolish for me to expect everyone to post something, this situation is really only OK when you have self-registration. If you could see the amount of work I have to do for every single person who asks to join us, you could understand why it is so frustrating when they don't even post to say Hello to the rest of us.

As for registrations coming from afar, well in truth they are non-existent. I have a way of knowing which country they are registering from. In the recent batch of 105 applications, we have had none from Australia or any other country likely to have an interest in Ruby, apart from the UK. There have been one or two from countries such as Italy, and as the names used seemed reasonable I allowed them as "Read Only" members while waiting for them to answer my query about their interest in Ruby. One of these added a pornographic website to their Member Profile, and it was only vigilance on my part that stopped anyone else from seeing it.

The "guests" who log on from places afar, particularly China, Pakistan, Ukraine, are not in fact viewing the website with any interest but their own. I don't know for certain how these "bots" work, but I guess initially the person does not even select our website for viewing, the computer does the searching. When it finds a website with a forum, it may use software to see what the registration process is and notify the person. They can then verify for themselves whether or not it is worth their effort to register. They can appear to be viewing our Index, or even a particular thread, but I guarantee they are not interested in what we have posted. If they find other people are writing the sort of stuff they want to display, or if they think they can get past me ( ) they can move forward and try to get in themselves. Fortunately for all of us, my process requires them to

• - use a name which might belong to a fan, not just press all the keys on the keyboard in the line starting with a-s-d (honestly, I have had several of these
  
  - use an email address which also looks reasonable (many hide behind gmail, whereas if it has a BT address they are more likely to be genuine)
  
  - register from a country that is likely to have an interest in Ruby (it was only after a time that I realised this does not include the ones mentioned in my previous paragraph)
  
  - reply to a message from me (the vast majority that get this far just ignore my message to them, so I delete them after a couple of weeks)

It is a great shame that it is perfectly possible that one day someone will read this and wish they could join us. Sadly this is the way of the world. It is just like complaining that you cannot park anymore to let passengers on or off your car right by the Arrivals or Departures entrances in UK airports - terrorists have ensured that the rest of us can no longer do this, we have to use the car parks. Well our undesirable potential members are not terrorists as such, but we still don't want them to write on our forum, so they are the ones that have spoiled it for the rest of us.

Martin, there may be another solution to this. For example, we could give an email address for people to write to asking to become members. Well it certainly won't be my email address, that's for sure! If I were to set up a ghost email address, not used for other things, do you think it would only get used for genuine applications, or do you think it might get flooded by rubbish applications? With only the evidence of the last few months, my guess is that it would be the latter, so not worth the effort.

And with the evidence of the number of postings we do actually get from new members, plus the fact that we seem to have lost an awful lot of our original members, is it still worth the effort?

[Bernie Burgess]

John, I think you misunderstood what I said in my posting. I merely remarked that the website is "being viewed all over the world", which I think is a wonderful thing, I didn't for one minute suggest that Gerald should do anything at all, on the contrary, I have stated quite clearly, on more than one occasion, that I agree with Gerald's actions to stop all the nuisance postings and I have made it clear that he is quite right in what he is doing. I added that we have HAD (in the past) postings from down under, a reference to the likes of our good friends Bill and Mary Hardman and a few others like them in Australia. I would like to think that the likes of Bill and Mary have been very helpful towards the website with their postings and videos in the past, do you agree?

Bernie.

[MARTIN FOSTER]

Thank you Gerald and very nice home page as well!