Non-Active Members

[The Great Hairy]

Gidday all,

I was having a little bit of a browse through the member's list recently, and I was checking out some of the names whom I didn't recognise. In some cases, some people haven't posted here for several years. So are non-active accounts purged? Is there any monitoring on these older, non-active members?

Cheers,
TGHO

[CM]

From what i know many people register but do not post. Lurk really. Around a year and a half ago Buck did a system purge or members and the website lost i don't know 2 or 3 thousand people. However before that he asked people who do use their nicks to pm him.

Personally i think another system wipe would be good. But it is up to buck to decide.

[Luis Antonio]

Perhaps and automatic exclusion sistem... like, if you dont use the forums (not even to read the discussions) for nine months, you receive a mail notification to re-activate your account. If you dont go online, your account vanishes after a month, or sg...

[CM]

Buck may have something like that already inbuilt with Vbulliten. But i mean what is the difference? Why should the number of posters matter?

Personally i think more should be done to advertise GB on non-bioware games. We got people here who regularly check for Bio-ware games. Other games do not get the same member attraction. That should be the emphasis.

Sorry to go off topic.

[The Great Hairy]

I'm more thinking of people with 500+ posts, but the last post was in 2002 or something like that.

Cheers,
TGHO

[Vicsun]

What incentive is there to delete unused accounts?

[CM]

Well first those people do come around still and do lurk. There is no need to delete those acounts.

[BuckGB]

There is no real advantage to pruning unused accounts, although I did go through and delete a few thousand of the oldest ones about six months ago. I can always go through the database again, but since removing the old ones doesn't really help the site's performance, I don't see any good reason to do so.

Additionally, removing users that have posted in the past actually has a few disadvantages tied to it. First, all of their past posts are automatically assigned to "Guest", meaning there is no way to distinguish a thousand posts from one another if they were all posted by different people that have since been deleted. Secondly, the board's statistics become inaccurate and I have to manually recompile all of them. Although the rebuilding process is automated, it's server intensive and takes a LOT of time to run its course. Third, it causes the user to have to register again if/when they choose to come back, which may keep them from posting again out of frustration.

Unless there's some sort of detrimental effect to having unused accounts that I'm unaware of, I don't think another user pruning is really needed at the current time.

[oozae]

My sentiments exactly

[ik911]

Originally Posted by Buck Satan

Unless there's some sort of detrimental effect to having unused accounts that I'm unaware of, I don't think another user pruning is really needed at the current time.

Can one choose a name that's already picked when registering? If not, that's a limitation to new members. It's a shame when one chooses a name that's already in use by an account that isn't used for a like a year.

Besides, one doesn't lurk for a year, without posting, with a username. Creating a username wouldn't make much sense if you're only planning to lurk around, right?

But it isn't a real strong argument for going through all that trouble.

[The Great Hairy]

When I posed the question of this thread I wasn't really thinking much about it, just curious. However one little thought has popped into my head - is the number of active members known as compared to total members? I would think advertisers would be more interested in active than total...

Just a thought! I'm speculating only.

Cheers,
TGHO

[werebeargoddess]

Yeah, I don't mean to spam or anything, but from what I've been able to tell, anly about a quarter of the members, maybe les, continue to post regularly. The other three quarters or so might post once or twice, then leave (or lurk), or just leave (or lurk), whithout ever posting. Just my thoughts.

[Curry]

Well I read these forums every day and I've been registered here for years. My post count is only a bit more than 200 because I just don't feel like spamming

[Adahn]

Well, technically people can lurk without registering can't they? What's the use of having an account if you shouldn't post? Perhaps the smartest thing would be to allow "Guests" to browse around the forums, but not post. If they want to post, then register simply, right?

[Vicsun]

Originally Posted by Adahn

Perhaps the smartest thing would be to allow "Guests" to browse around the forums, but not post. If they want to post, then register simply, right?

I believe that's how it currently works