I've noticed that the number of guests on Arlong Park is alarmingly high, where even in the dead of night with only ninteen registered members there are numbers in the eighties and even hundreds. Jonas has briefed me that a large share of AP's traffic comes from Japan itself, and the hypothesis is that they are coming for links to the OP RAWs and the like.
Certain people are paying for AP's maintinence services out of their own pockets, which makes me feel rather guilty since they're paying a lot for hammering by people who are not even part of the community. Our forum is still small, especially in comparison to the Pokemon giants during the turn, so the maintinence costs for AP are likely to represent a pretty large burden on those folks.
If they're cool with paying for the lurkers, I'm fine with that as well, but I'm proposing this since I understand the worth of hard-earned money and it strikes me as rather unnecessarily cruel to have people pay so much for non-participants. In the case of which their presence would be relatively small compared with other boards (like us in 2ch) I'd say no big deal, but the lurkers grossly outnumber the registered members even during non-peak hours.
A note: I'm not suggesting we ban IP addresses from other foreign countries, but just Japan, where the overwhelming number of lurkers come from. If we have friends in Japan, perhaps we can set some sort of permission to give them clearence into AP.
-T.
