I'm spinning this off from this thread:

http://www.adminfusion.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16695

so as not to derail the original topic.

This made me interested in another question, which has been asked on other boards but I'd be interested in hearing the opinions here.

How many admins out there prune inactive accounts? About a quarter of my members are pretty active on the forums and about half have never made a post. I've been on the fence about deleting inactive accounts. A lot of those lurkers still visit the forums reguarly to read and I know that some places (read DMOZ :banghead: ) won't list forums unless they have a certain number of members/posts. I'm hesitant to prune accounts but there are some on the board who would prefer I do.

James

When i used the Excoboard inactive users were automatically deleted after 60 days.. this caused me alot of hassle as some members, like you say, lurked or visited rarely and they needed to reregister. It makes me wonder how many thought 'sod that' and never bothered...

If someone has registered on a forum i personally do not think they should be removed for inactiveness as they miss newsletters, announcements and the opportunity to participate.

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Tbf
I wont be doing this getting members mean a lot now days and why should i do that...

lot of them sign here just to download gfx resources for their forums but i see few of them become quite active after sign in even after a long time of silence...

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I did used to prune inactive members but I realised that some of them were signing in to lurk and read the boards (although all of my boards are guest viewable). I stopped deleting members when I realised this. Although I have a feeling, because we have so many inactive members, that I may prune every couple of months. To me, an inactive member, is someone who has zero posts so people with posts don't get deleted even if they only visit once every couple of months.

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I delete inactive users, those being members with zero posts, after 30 days. I'm not as interested in the number of members that I have as I am in participation.

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I'm not interested in the amount of members either, i just believe if someone took the time to register then their membership should remain open for quite a while. Some members could have pc probs or life has taken over their net time for a while, many reasons. i would not like to promote that members need to be regular to be valued...

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My rule of thumb:

Accounts can stay, even if inactive. The only time I'd delete an empty account is if a new member registered and wished to change their name to an already taken but unused name. Such that if somebody has gone as far as sending a PM request for a username, and the name requested belongs to somebody who hasn't posted at all in 6 months and has a post count of 0, then I'd delete the unused account so his screenname could be re-assigned.

I used to do a prune every six months for users without any activity for more than a year (that is without even a login in that period of time). Now that vB keeps a score of how many users are active I don't know if I'll resume this practice.

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I have never done it, I have to agree with Shellspeare's first post completely, I think they would miss out on the opertunity to become involved if I did.
Though I will admit that I have used it as a scare tactic on my forum to get the members back over there.
Rotten, I know.

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I see nothing wrong with deleting the few members that have been registered for nearly a year, and have never been seen again. Or perhaps, they should be sent an individual email to ask if they wish to be removed, or if they are still interested in being a member of the forum. Adleast, then, they can't say they were deleted without their consent.