What happened?

[Neonriser]

When I first came to this forum, I noticed that there were almost no posts in the forum. The only posts were the ones in the blog updates and the off-topic section. I checked the stats and there was a small community of users at some point in the forum’s history. Did something happen that caused all the posts to be wiped out from history?

I’d like to know.

[Clé]

There never really was a community of users. There were legions of spambots before I implemented the anti-spam Q&A. I went through and deleted all the thousands of spam accounts, but if there was an account that hadn't made any spam posts and wasn't obviously a spammer (no spam links in profile; name wasn't randomly-generated gibberish) I gave them the benefit of the doubt and didn't delete them, even if they hadn't made any posts and it seemed likely they probably were an automated account. So the old users showing up in the stats who never posted almost certainly were created as spam accounts but weren't deleted because there was no definitive evidence of that and I preferred to err on the side of leaving them, just in case. The only posts I've deleted were obvious spam posts, but there were a lot of them—though none since I implemeted the Q&A.