Visitor count 600 in the last 24 hours as of 6:44 PM EDST.

Things are looking brighter. Someone must have trimmed the wick and cleaned the lens.

It's good to see that our traffic is picking up.

Bob

Great News !!!

Could it be due to the new LE releases and limited LLOM's ???

851 visitors this morning. This could be a new record! Hope some of these visitors are going to join the Opportunity Drawing.

Over 950 in the last 24 hours now.

Here's what Rich and I are thinking. Our Forum has shown up on a list created for spammers. You can Google "Forum Spamming" and find lots of news about that.

This is probably what's accounting for the unusually big numbers over the past few days.

Not so long ago, we had lots of applications from Russia - probably spammers looking to promote something via posts.

Over the past few days, Rich reports scores of applications from China. Same prospect.

It takes some time for Rich to scan through each applicant to ferret out whether they are truly interested in joining us to talk about Lighthouses or to spam the forums.

It's not too likely that our 'friends' from China and Russia actually read English but we're still not telling them our techniques for keeping them out of our hair. Let's just say Rich is the man -- and deserves our thanks for his hard work.

Thanks Richard--well done!!

Sandy

Very interesting. Thanks, Rich.

Judy

John has been very attentive to my complaining about these spammers and has really given me some insite and tricks on how to keep these spammers away. I look at each and everyone of the new registrations to make sure I'm not accidentily rejecting someone that is a lighthouse person and every now and then I will reject someone that I shouldn't. Hopefully, I will hear back from them if I goof up with an email saying "what's wrong with me and why did you reject me"? Tuesday morning I had 79 new registrations and only one was ligitimate but I had to review the other 78 and they were all spammers from China and Russia selling everything from vitamins to porn. On the bright side, we have had 4 new members in the last couple of days so please take the time to welcome them and make them feel at home.

I really want to thank John for acting so quickly and investigating what was happening. While these spammers are not getting to register, we think they are somehow affecting out visitor count so while we are active I don't think we are as active as the count shows. If we are truely as active as the count shows I certainly hope that they are taking advantage of our Opportunity Drawing and our Forum Exclusive(Wisconsin Point).

Being basically a computer "illiterate" I thank John and Rich for their efforts in protecting this site and us from the inconvienence and garbage that come from these spammers!

Rick

Thanks to John and Rich for their efforts to keep out spammers, and maintain the forum for lighthouse enthusiasts only.

Max and Sue also send a huge thanks to Rich and John and any others for all their hours of work to keep the spammers out of this site! How fortunate we are to have people like these step up to take care of problems.

My wife has to delete huge quanities of unwanted emails at her work every week. What a waste of time! Hopefully someone will develop something like the "do not call list" to stop this nonsense that wastes peoples time.

We're down to our old usual of 350-400 visitors a day, but Rich still reported ~75 rejects.

Rich & John:

You the man (men, that is).

Ellie