I just suspended 223,000 accounts from Tabulas - in about 2 weeks they'll go through the deletion process. This has shrunk Tabulas by 66% in user count, but I think we've gained a lot more in quality. 

The first step to getting Tabulas back on the road to recovery is to deal with the rampant spam problem. I've been tackling it on various fronts over the past few years - but today the ban hammer came down hard. I won't get into details, but spammers had been running past the spam filters by not posting any spammy content, but instead setting their user description with spammy links. 

I started running the spam filters against the user descriptions, but decided to take a more extreme measure and simply set to delete all accounts with no entries and no images. I then cleared out all unclaimed accounts (~30,000) for a total of about 250,000 accounts removed (or set to be removed) from Tabulas. 

The site is down to about 115,000 users, but I think the quality (and the discoverability) of the community should rise. 

I also shut off user registrations for Tabulas - I don't ever plan on opening up completely free registrations. I will be looking at implementing a invite system that will allow valued members of Tabulas to invite their friends into the system. 

It seems a bit backward to be proud of deleting so many accounts (I can no longer say Tabulas is 500,000 users strong), but it feels like the right thing to do. This great post from Dalton made me realize that even with 115K users, we have critical mass with Tabulas. I'm convinced we can make this community great again. 

Future idea: limit # of friends to 50 users per accounts.