I've removed the message from the first post since the club has been cleaned up. In addition, the rule that new members had one month to say who they are is gone because it wasn't being used in the first place. Over the past month we've been sending PMs to people that request access to the club, asking them to identify themselves before we let them in. We've had some...pretty interesting people, to say the least, try to join the club. None of them have responded. Some of them post elsewhere like normal, so it's obvious they're still active here, and one of them didn't seem to do anything other than send random friend invites and get nasty replies on his profile. Creepy stuff.
That brings me to the point of this message, and the reason behind not letting people into the club before they identify themselves, which is these people most likely are not on AN at all. I did a little digging lately for the second to last member to try to join, and I'm going to copy and paste the important parts of what I wrote here:
I've been investigating our situation with these people who just come out of nowhere requesting to join the club, and I want to share a theory I have with you guys to see what you think about it.
I checked the profile pages of the members of the club, and I noticed on ------ profile that both ---- and ----------- have made comments there. I then figured out how to rig the com-to-com function to display comments between two other people. It works just like how you would use the shared anime lists, except instead of changing the names around, you change the User IDs around. If you move your mouse over the friend remove/send option on any given profile, you can see their ID number. I did this to see if ------ might know who these people are. He hasn't responded to ---- yet even though he's made two comments, but he did respond to -----------. It would appear that ------ doesn't know either of these people. He has them on his friends list, but it's possible that he accepted their random friend requests. I noticed that ----------- has sent a few "hey I like your pic" comments to people, so it's quite likely that he's the type of person who only tries to get a very large number of people on his friends list. ---- is without a doubt, just take a look at his friends list.
I was thinking that these friends list people usually also have a ton of clubs, and I doubt they use a majority of them, if any at all. It's possible that when these people talk to one of the members of our club, they attempt to join for no good reason, just to get another club in their list. I can't think of any other reason why most of the unidentified people refuse to reply to identification requests. It's like they know they're caught or something.
I just don't think it's a coincidence that both of these people attempting to join right now have commented on ------ profile for the first time within the last few days. It could actually be that they are from AN and noticed the club through his profile, but past results don't seem to point to that.
One of the two people has since responded to my reply with their name on AN. I logged onto AN and checked the profile, and the member's join date was about one day after reading the indentification request PM I sent him, which was also about three days after he requested access to the club. As you can see, this person wasn't a member on AN when they tried to join the AN club... This is the only case where the person has tried this. There's no way to know for sure for the other people that have tried to join, but most of them have had ginormous friends and clubs lists, and after checking the profiles of people they've talked to, they've usually done that, "Hey I like your picture! *friend request*" thing, that's a little too common on this site. I'm sure most people have received one or more of those.
Because of this site's social networking aspect, and the people that dwell in such places, we're going to ask people to say who they are on AN before letting them into the club, so they don't try to pull a slow one over on us. There's no need to give members a month to identify themselves now, nor is there a need to check this thread anymore as everything is going to be taken care of before anyone even gets into the club.
I'm either going to white this out, add spoiler tags, or delete it after a few weeks so that random people skimming through the thread/club won't see this and think to make an account before joining. For now if we see people with zero posts on AN that joined the day the request was sent we'll be able to figure out what's going on.
Yeah i noticed other sites are like that too (veoh). I would get one little comment than an invite...i look at their profile and they have like 400 friends, no uploads or favorites. I would reply "Sorry, I deny all friends request of people that 1) profile has nothing to do with anime and 2) doesnt have at least 5 favorites. " Why would i want to be friends (ie a convenient way to link to your profile) if you profile is basically empty? :P
