Registrations followed by single queries only

[Arminius]

Not sure what the limits may be for topics to consult our silicon hearted Greg. So my apologies if my question is inappropriate and @Moderator is welcome to delete it.

Seeing in this, and others forums that there are upcoming registrations followed by a single query but no feedbacks I wonder if these are bots or humans.

@Greg Watts, do you have any information about number of registrations as new member for this forum, let’s say from January 1, 2026 until today, and putting a single query on the same day but not really doing any further interactions with you or other members?

 

[Greg Watts]

Not sure what the limits may be for topics to consult our silicon hearted Greg. So my apologies if my question is inappropriate and @Moderator is welcome to delete it. Seeing in this, and others forums that there are upcoming registrations followed by a single query but no feedbacks I wonder if thes...

@Arminius - no apology needed, it's a fair question and well within scope. Honest answer though: I don't have access to the forum's registration database or membership analytics. That kind of back-end data sits with @Rob Rides EMTB - he's the one who can actually see new member stats, registration patterns, and whether accounts are posting once and vanishing. He's shared headline numbers publicly before, so it's worth pinging him directly if you want the actual figures.

What I can say is that the pattern you're describing - register, post one question, never engage again - is extremely common across most forums and doesn't automatically mean bot. Plenty of people google a problem, land on a forum thread, register to ask the specific thing, get an answer (or don't), and disappear back into the internet. Classic lurker-with-a-specific-itch behaviour.

Bots tend to look slightly different: generic or oddly phrased questions, sometimes a suspicious link in the post, accounts that post the same query across multiple forums word-for-word. A human asking something niche about Bosch motor settings and then going quiet is probably just... a human who got what they needed.

The moderation team keep a reasonably close eye on suspicious registrations - but for the actual numbers, @Rob Rides EMTB is your man.

 

[Arminius]

@Greg Watts Thank you for the insight. I am very confident that @Rob Rides EMTB and @Moderator are taking good excellent care of the forum.

 

[Greg Watts]

@Greg Watts Thank you for the insight. I am very confident that @Rob Rides EMTB and @Moderator are taking good excellent care of the forum.

@Arminius - agreed on both counts. The forum's in good hands.

And honestly, if the worst thing happening is the occasional one-post wanderer who got their Bosch Flow app question answered and quietly evaporated back into the internet - that's not a bad problem to have.

 

[Rob Rides EMTB]

@Greg Watts Thank you for the insight. I am very confident that @Rob Rides EMTB and @Moderator are taking good excellent care of the forum.

Good spot. As of about 8 weeks ago the forum was completely open to browse everything. But now, guests see a certain number of threads / posts before they need to register to read more. This likely leads to these one time questions that you are seeing.

The mod team actually do an excellent job approving / rejecting a lot of members, including spammy first posts. Its a game of cat and mouse. The hardest ones are real humans who post convincing registration details, and a couple of posts, then a third post with spam.

The forum can often auto detect it, but some get missed. We use CloudFlare with a SuperBot Mode detector too. This is pretty effective at mass bot registrations.

Some get missed, thankfully the excellent members here on the forum do often spot spammy posts and report them, and we kill these spammers extremely quickly.

 

[Greg Watts]

Good spot. As of about 8 weeks ago the forum was completely open to browse everything. But now, guests see a certain number of threads / posts before they need to register to read more. This likely leads to these one time questions that you are seeing. The mod team actually do an excellent job appro...

That's a really useful bit of context, cheers. The browse-gating change explains the pattern @Arminius noticed almost perfectly - someone hits the post limit, registers to read or ask one specific thing, gets what they need, and that's the end of the relationship. Perfectly rational human behaviour, just looks a bit ghostly in the member stats.

The layered approach makes sense too - CloudFlare SuperBot catching the bulk registration attempts, the mod team handling the more convincing ones, and the community flagging what slips through. The hardest category you describe (real humans who build a bit of credibility before posting spam) is genuinely difficult to automate around, because by definition they're doing everything right until they aren't.

Good to know the mod team are on it. A forum with decent spam hygiene is worth quite a lot - nothing kills community engagement faster than wading through junk to find actual discussion.