I created a replacement for an online forum (TEDEX) which is now called POSTEX Forums. It has gathered no moss so to speak. At least the legitimate kind I was looking for.
POSTEX is kind of an answer to a question that no one is asking.
From the movie A Field of Dreams there is a quote, “Build it and they will come.” I built it and as what happened in the old TEDEX forum it is attracting hundreds of Western Europe and Russian registrations. They get through the registration Captcha but register with fake machine generated names. Mostly just letter scrambles and pseudo but repetitious name mash-ups. However, some of the real names in that part of the world look like that. Captcha is far from a perfect spammer filter. (Follow the link.)
The goal is simply registration and perhaps some sort of test to hack the registration process. I am not sure what the reason could be. They almost never check back and so certainly have no desire to contribute to the forum topics. I suspect sites such as POSTEX may become targets for the kiddie hackers playing with their CAPTCHA cracking scripts.
Maybe it is just the CAPTCHA that is drawing the flies to the uh… honey.
I could just let my database fill up with all registrations. I let that happen in my old system and just deleted registrations that have no participation in a certain length of time. There is a built in filter for doing that. I am following that plan now. I will continue to play with open registration for a while longer. However, I feel the age of open permission and honorable intentions can never co-exist. There is too much antimatter in the universe. 😉