Can Somebody Explain This?

Morgan · Dec 19, 2015 7:37 PM

I was going through the user ID's, down to 6001, and I counted 35 vacant ID's, 39 unlisted accounts, which had "Member" as their title, despite making 0 posts, and 4 unlisted accounts which were banned.

Swaffy · Dec 20, 2015 12:54 AM

aliens

kingwyatt95 · Dec 20, 2015 2:57 AM

that or mutant turtles

EricChristianOlsenFanatic · Dec 20, 2015 3:11 AM

Zombies.

Morgan · Dec 20, 2015 10:20 AM

This is a serious question.

Stormy · Dec 20, 2015 2:46 PM

What do you mean by "vacant IDs" and "unlisted accounts"?

If someone with the title "member" has less than 10 posts, it's because they were a spammer and I manually altered their post counts to reflect that some of their posts had been deleted.

Morgan · Dec 20, 2015 3:07 PM

Stormy wrote:

What do you mean by "vacant IDs" and "unlisted accounts"?
If someone with the title "member" has less than 10 posts, it's because they were a spammer and I manually altered their post counts to reflect that some of their posts had been deleted.

By "vacant IDs", I mean that there are certain possible account URLs which give you a "Bad request." message (As an example, my account is number 6170, which should mean that I was the 6170th registered user.), and by "unlisted accounts", I mean that there are certain accounts which don't appear in the user list.

Stormy · Dec 20, 2015 3:43 PM

"Bad request" means it either doesn't exist (was deleted) or you're not allowed to view it (the account has not been validated by the user).

I still don't know what you mean by "unlisted accounts"... What accounts do you expect to be there that aren't there?

Edit: I think I get it - you mean you were able to view the profiles with certain IDs by typing in the URL, but when you went to look for them in the user list, they weren't there? That could actually be because they're unverified, now that I think about it. I can view unregistered profiles, but I assumed regular users wouldn't be able to and would just see the bad request page.

Last edited by Stormy (Dec 20, 2015 4:16 PM)

36IStillLikeSpyro36 · Dec 20, 2015 4:11 PM

Morgan wrote:

As an example, my account is number 6170, which should mean that I was the 6170th registered user.

i looked at the homepage and it appears that's not how it works, as there are only 5,817 registered users. unless there are really over 200 unverified accounts on here. on the other hand i'm not sure how the numbers would work.

Stormy · Dec 20, 2015 4:20 PM

The database does increment user IDs by one with each new user, but there could be a number of reasons why some IDs were skipped or no longer exist. Deleted and unregistered users (and those users that weren't migrated) would be the main one, but there could have been other things done to the database that I wouldn't know about because they happened before I had access.

Morgan · Dec 20, 2015 4:54 PM

36IStillLikeSpyro36 wrote:

Morgan wrote:
As an example, my account is number 6170, which should mean that I was the 6170th registered user.
i looked at the homepage and it appears that's not how it works, as there are only 5,817 registered users. unless there are really over 200 unverified accounts on here. on the other hand i'm not sure how the numbers would work.

That's because of all of the unused numbers.

Stormy wrote:

"Bad request" means it either doesn't exist (was deleted) or you're not allowed to view it (the account has not been validated by the user).
I still don't know what you mean by "unlisted accounts"... What accounts do you expect to be there that aren't there?
Edit: I think I get it - you mean you were able to view the profiles with certain IDs by typing in the URL, but when you went to look for them in the user list, they weren't there? That could actually be because they're unverified, now that I think about it. I can view unregistered profiles, but I assumed regular users wouldn't be able to and would just see the bad request page.

I'm making a double post, because the only other option is to memorise your post, which is far too difficult. Please merge the posts, and then swap them around.

If the accounts are unverified, then why do most of them have "Member" as their title?

P.S. I sent you a private message about something which is unrelated to this discussion a while ago. Please could you respond to it?

Mod edit: You still should not double post. Copying and pasting is not "difficult."

Last edited by Stormy (Dec 20, 2015 5:54 PM)

Stormy · Dec 20, 2015 5:57 PM

I have no idea. If you could show me an example I might be able to figure it out.

Please do not double post next time. Just copy and paste the previous post. You don't have to memorize anything.

Morgan · Dec 20, 2015 6:37 PM

Stormy wrote:

I have no idea. If you could show me an example I might be able to figure it out.
Please do not double post next time. Just copy and paste the previous post. You don't have to memorize anything.

I can't copy and paste on my Xbox 360.

Here are 3 different examples:

http://www.spyroforum.com/profile.php?id=6232
http://www.spyroforum.com/profile.php?id=6188
http://www.spyroforum.com/profile.php?id=6172

Last edited by Morgan (Dec 20, 2015 6:44 PM)

Stormy · Dec 20, 2015 7:03 PM

Then don't quote. You don't get to bend the rules just because they're inconvenient to you and then make me fix it for you.

The first two profiles are in the new members group, as they should be if they have no posts. The third link is a bad request.

Morgan · Dec 20, 2015 7:12 PM

Stormy wrote:

Then don't quote. You don't get to bend the rules just because they're inconvenient to you and then make me fix it for you.
The first two profiles are in the new members group, as they should be if they have no posts. The third link is a bad request.

This is how it is for me:

The first one is a regular member.
The second one is banned.
The third one is a bad request.

Stormy · Dec 20, 2015 7:21 PM

Okay... then nothing's unusual at all about the second two. "hkseonw5" was probably banned before the account had a chance to be verified because it's an obvious spam account. The first one might've made 10 spam posts which were deleted, and then the post count was edited to zero. Doesn't really matter, either way.

LXShadow · Dec 20, 2015 8:00 PM

Not that it's any of my business but I'm personally less curious as to why this happens than I am curious as to why the OP is so interested in this in the first place? Counting through a few hundred user IDs isn't a normal everyday pasttime. o.o

Not to mention the topic that you started around the time you joined about 'worst troll on the forum' or something like that. No offence but that strikes me as a little weird, even suspicious =/

Last edited by LXShadow (Dec 20, 2015 8:01 PM)

Morgan · Dec 20, 2015 8:35 PM

LXShadow wrote:

Not that it's any of my business but I'm personally less curious as to why this happens than I am curious as to why the OP is so interested in this in the first place? Counting through a few hundred user IDs isn't a normal everyday pasttime. o.o
Not to mention the topic that you started around the time you joined about 'worst troll on the forum' or something like that. No offence but that strikes me as a little weird, even suspicious =/

I like finding things that are beneath the surface.

Stormy · Dec 20, 2015 8:42 PM

LXShadow wrote:

Not that it's any of my business but I'm personally less curious as to why this happens than I am curious as to why the OP is so interested in this in the first place? Counting through a few hundred user IDs isn't a normal everyday pasttime. o.o
Not to mention the topic that you started around the time you joined about 'worst troll on the forum' or something like that. No offence but that strikes me as a little weird, even suspicious =/

I was thinking along the same lines, but my troll detector is prone to false positives. tongue

Dark Intentions · Jan 25, 2016 4:05 AM

Personally, I don't see the significance of this subject, why do abnormal listings in the member roster matter? In fact, as pointed out, this OP's "serious" need to know is borderline suspicious as it comes across as trolling.

Though scrolling through here, something did catch my curiosity.

Stormy wrote:

Okay... then nothing's unusual at all about the second two. "hkseonw5" was probably banned before the account had a chance to be verified because it's an obvious spam account. The first one might've made 10 spam posts which were deleted, and then the post count was edited to zero. Doesn't really matter, either way.

How can an account which hasn't posted be an "obvious spam account"? That seems judgemental.

Flapjacks · Jan 25, 2016 7:29 AM

Dark Intentions wrote:

How can an account which hasn't posted be an "obvious spam account"? That seems judgemental.

the name is seemingly random characters, except there is probably a pattern. pattern can probably be found by looking at other spam accounts. i seem to remember spam bots in diablo 2 having seemingly random characters in their names, but the name of the character/ the name of the account always matched, and the second/last characters were always numbers, or something like that.

Stormy · Jan 25, 2016 12:34 PM

Yep, usernames that look like that are never not spambots. Also I can check the registration IP address against stopforumspam.com if it's not already obvious enough by the meaningless username and spammy links they often put in their signatures and website fields.

Morgan · Jan 25, 2016 6:40 PM

Dark Intentions wrote:

Personally, I don't see the significance of this subject, why do abnormal listings in the member roster matter? In fact, as pointed out, this OP's "serious" need to know is borderline suspicious as it comes across as trolling.
Though scrolling through here, something did catch my curiosity.
Stormy wrote:
Okay... then nothing's unusual at all about the second two. "hkseonw5" was probably banned before the account had a chance to be verified because it's an obvious spam account. The first one might've made 10 spam posts which were deleted, and then the post count was edited to zero. Doesn't really matter, either way.
How can an account which hasn't posted be an "obvious spam account"? That seems judgemental.

I said that it was a serious question, as in, "This isn't a joke.", not as in "I urgently need to know this.".

Mr. John · Feb 01, 2016 7:06 PM

You must have seen spammers yeah we got a lot of those.

Dark Intentions · Feb 02, 2016 4:28 AM

Both Flapjacks and Stormy, thanks for the enlightenment. I see now.
That reminds me of when I was active on Neopets several years ago and being stalked by a troll. I'd gotten them banned several times but they kept returning with the same basic name but different placements of underscores or slight alterations to numbers at the end (ex. extra digits like 001 instead of 01).

Last edited by Dark Intentions (Feb 02, 2016 4:29 AM)

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Can Somebody Explain This?

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