Active members?

[Rei_Jin]

I was wondering if there were any thoughts in the pipeline to get rid of all the inactive accounts? Last time I looked there was about 11,000 members, and of those 11,000 I'm sure that less than half even read the messageboards.

I know it's not important, but everytime I look at the members on the bottom of the page, I can't help but wonder where those 10,000 people I've never seen post are, and if they even exist...

[LadyGlutter]

There are more reasons to be a member than just posting. I know that I was a "lurker" for a long while with just a user name. It was the only way I could search for threads by the Giant, for example, or have threads notify me when there were updates. Also there are some people who use the Private Messages with friends that they made on these boards, but maybe currently aren't very active as posters. For these reasons, I personally don't think it would be fair to just randomly purge all the pixies after a set amount of time because they don't post like crazy.

[Amotis]

Plus, who will make all the toys come Christmas?

[tape_measure]

NOT it!

[NEO|Phyte]

not it!

[LordOfNarf]

oh Oh Memememememe!

OGRE SMASH TOYS!

Awwwwwwwwww......

[Shea Landford]

Elfs make the toys, not pixies, and even if they did, wouldn't they be able to make more toys if they were kicked off the forum?

[Saithis Bladewing]

Hm, well that settles it. I guses this means we need an Elf in the Playground title!

Also, I'm not too experienced with YaBB, but I know that with the phpBB forum I was using it wasn't easy to just delete people who are inactve...I suppose you could script it to just go through and routinely delete people with 0 posts or who haven't logged on in X number of days, but...like people have said, what about the lurkers and stuff? I say just keep it the way it is. Besides, 11,000 members is impressive for the numbers. ;D

[HempRope]

And RAWBear and The Giant have said before that even if they were interested in getting rid of the accounts, it wouldn't be worth the effort. Each one takes up a tiny amount of storage space. If they needed to free up space, it would be much more effecient to dispose of all the locked threads or somesuch.

[DarkCloud]

Personally, I have no opinion on cleaning the member registry- however one argument in favour of clearing the registry is that by deleting old usernames that have never or infrequently been logged into- the moderators can free up popular login names for newbies.

After a forum reaches a certain number of members, lots of good names are taken and people start adding numbers to their names- which certainly looks absurd.

But, as mentioned before, cleaning the registry is a lot of work for minimal payoff.