I just wanted to share that every day I deny at least one, usually several, malicious applications for membership to this forum.  All of them are real people.  I figured out how to defeat forum spam bots several years ago, and it has been so effective that not one has gotten through.  So these people, that apply daily, are writing anything from stupid to compelling reasons for wanting to join in the application section.  They use AI to create the reasons, which makes it nearly impossible to tell if it's legit or not.  I use AI to investigate them via their IP address, locations, emails, etc., to figure out if they are real or not.  On the rare occasions that one gets through, he doesn't last long and when discovered is deleted, banned, and all their posts erased.

Also, this forum runs on its own dedicated Unix server, is fully funded by Decware, has zero advertisements, zero spam.  I believe it may be the only one on the internet that can say that.

It is old school, which shifts from being a bad thing when you're young, to being a good thing when you get older.  That said, it existed before there were smart phones, before Google ever existed, before social media, and has no plans to embrace any of them.  Not everything has to grow and evolve and change because - believe it or not, not everything the present generation comes up with is actually better than what the previous generation came up with.  In fact some of it is greatly diminished.

On top of manually protecting the forum from human spammers, the forum has elaborate bot protection, and just to give you an idea, it automatically defended itself against over 12,000 attacks in 2025.

Then there are the members of this forum.  No where on the net does such a large and tight group of respectful audiophiles exist.  We don't have a lot of drama.  People don't get attacked for having an opinion.  Everyone here is the reason this hobby is so great.  We're in our 30th year now and I just wanted to say thank you to each and every one of you who read and post in this forum.

Steve : )

Thank you, Steve!  

I greatly value my Decware Audio Forums membership for a lot of reasons, including the way it is set up and run!

Thank you Steve. Network security was my day job for many years and I appreciate what an unending responsibility it is. We have an amazing community here and a little spam is a small price to pay imo.

It is mostly low level vandalism, like internet graffiti. Beginning hackers, we call them “script kiddies” in the biz, download scripts, aka bots, that scan the internet looking for sites with  vulnerabilities, and since the the code for this site is pushing 20 years old there are plenty. Since ChatGPT it is easy for the bot to read the site and make posts in relatively coherent English. The script kiddy gets her or his hacker tenderfoot badge and they move on. Generally it is nothing more than a waste of bandwidth and disk space, but they also post links that are potentially more dangerous.

Thanks Steve!!  This is the only forum that I check and enjoy reading every day.  It’s a great place to share one’s passion with fellow audiophiles with zero drama.  Thank you again for all of your hard work to combat spam and bots that try and invade this pristine space.