A Question/Suggestion

I was just thinking about the members on this board, and decided I should post this.

Many times in the past someone has come on here and posted a thread saying that we should clean out the members who are not active. After much discussion we all decide it is best that we do not do this.

One of the main reasons we do not do this is because many people "lurk", per say. In other words, they might visit the boards and just read posts, but not really post anything themselves. We then conclude that it would not be wise to delete their accounts, especially since many of us did they same when we first came to these boards.

I, in fact, was one of those. I became a member in 1999 (back in the days of the old board), but rarely posted for about 5 or 6 months, until finally decided to become an active member of the board because I thought it was a good community.

Anyways, I do not dispute our decision to keep these members. In fact, I think it is a good one.

Rather, I have some questions, and maybe we can have a small amount of discussion as well.

1. Lets assume for now that most people who do lurk, do it at most for 1 year. Take into account all member accounts that are at least 1 year old and have not been used at all for at least 1 year. How much space do these accounts take on the server?

2. How much trouble is it for the webmaster to handle these accounts?

3. Ask the same questions for accounts that have not been active at all 2 years.

4. If an account has not been active at all for 2 entire years, i.e. that person has not even logged in once over the past 2 years (I have already found several that are like that), would those best be deleted, or would they best be kept and also be nice factor in our member count?

Anyways, it's not something I am overly worried about. I was just thinking about it. I should probably go do something useful now...

that's right. I actually lurked around in 2000 for programming help, for about a year. but i didn't register until 2001 :/

Is it really worth it to go hunt down accounts that haven't been used for a certain amount of time? I mean, what do we really stand to gain by doing so?

Well, that's correct. It doesn't really help us at all to delete accounts. The only person it would help is the webmaster in administering the site. That is why I posed the question of how much effort does it take to manage all those accounts that are dormant for 2 years?

we had this exact same discussion over at TheDevelopersAlliance.com, and it ended up with us just not caring about the "dead" members. When it comes down to it, the space a member takes up tends to be quite miniscule (unless they have a lot of PMs or something...)

The only thing we might gain from doing that here is a speed increase on the server in some cases when involving anything searching the list of users, but as far as I can tell, this site runs perfectly fine as it is.

So when it comes down to it, it's really just personal preference, and what the webmaster decides, because there isn't really THAT much of advantage of clearing out the "dead" users, but there's also not really any advantage of keeping them either......just depends how much work the webmaster wants to do.