Since Monday I've been monitoring the number of new members, the number of new posts and the number of new threads. I've also been checking for bots.

For those of you that don't know, bots usually enter "123456" into one of the fields in the "About Me" section on their profile. I've been using that to identify bots (I don't think every bot does it, but the vast majority do. I think they do it to make them look like real members).

These figures aren't final (I'll post them on Monday, along with figures from a few weeks before the change to the registration system), but over the course of six days we've had:

Twenty-three new members, ten of whom posted. Those ten posted, between them, seventy-six times, of which one post was a new thread. Of the twenty-three new members, zero were bots (that is, no fields in their profiles are "123456". In fact, all twenty-three members have left their profiles blank).

What's even more amazing is if you look at the list of online members - over the past few days, there have been very few names in dark grey (the dark grey colour shows members with no posts - bots and spammers, mostly, apart from the Arcade Lurkers).

Personally I think that the addition of the questionnaire to the registration page is a success, and one that has made the amount of spam more manageable (not that it was too hard to manage in the first place - just more time consuming).