Check out this ancient thread on the subject.
I think that’s the final word on the subject.
And here I am, Member #41, as close as anyone here will ever get to the answer, seeing as Member #42 no longer exists.
Perhaps forcing the trolls to eat the Spam might go some way towards ameliorating both problems.
Probably not, though, since there is far more Spam than trolls to eat it.
Gaps in forum numbers are a quirk of vBulletin.
Let’s say we’ve got a forum administrator with a fresh installation of vBulletin. The first subforum created will be f=1, the second f=2, the third f=3, and so on. If they create five subforums at the start, the highest numbered forum will be f=5. If they delete the second subforum, f=2, the other forum numbers don’t change. If, later on, the admin wants to create a new subforum, it will be f=6; the numbers of deleted forums are not recycled, and there will be a permanent gap in the forum numbering sequence.
I wonder what the deal is with the Main subforum (f=15) on the SDMB.
Isn’t Forum 19 where Cecil’s responses to the Teeming Minions are re-routed? After all, “They” can’t let him get Too powerful. It’s all part of the take-over plot y’a know!
That’s my practice room. The staff made me isolate it from the rest of the board.
Everybody’s a critic.
I don’t know which is more demanding at the moment (way back when I was a mod, moving was the Worst Possible Thing you could do to the board, but that was many versions ago), but there are other good reasons to hide threads rather than delete them. It also provides a measure of record-keeping: If the mods notice a pattern in who’s starting spam threads, for instance, that might help empower them to prevent the threads from being started in the first place. There have also been a few incidents where the Powers that Be have cooperated in off-board actions against wrongdoers (I seem to recall one case where a member was violating his school’s computer usage policies, for instance), and those threads might come in handy as evidence. So it’s best not to do anything that would permanently get rid of them.