Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Ban Inactive Users

This vBulletin product / cronjob bans inactive users at regular intervals:

• users who have registered but haven't confirmed their email within the past 21 days and never have posted (applies to user group 3 only)
• users who have registered but haven't connected within the past 90 days and never have posted (applies to user group 2 only)

There are no user interfaces or settings, but you may change the cronjob interval from the AdminCP - Scheduled Tasks.
A short installation guide is included.

[forumrunt]

cool! Thanks I will try it

[fred13]

What is the point of banning already inactive users?

[y2ksw]

The main reason is to move them out of sight and reduce the number of potential spammers.

Also, the european privacy law requires to delete or deactivate inactive user accounts at latest after 6 months. Checking which users fall into this category may become a major task on boards with more than a few hundred users.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Please link me to an official site where this privacy law is published. I never heard of a law that requires you to delete or de-activate accounts on forum software if they have been inactive for 6 months.

[y2ksw]

http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/fsj/privacy/

Here is it all. Due to being a company holder, I have to follow the standards more strictly than private fellows, but this is also changing soon. Failing to adhere to the rules may result into severe fines, reaching, as far as I rember, up to €30.000,00 and 5 years of prison. This is the main reason why, since the law became active, european spammers have become so rare. The laws regard "user accounts" and "sensitive data" in general.

In order to publish a forum, we are also forced to show a privacy statement, similar to the one you find on my site. To be exact, it should be in the language of the country in which the site is hosted. Since my site addresses mainly international visitors, my personal "free" license was to publish just one in English.

With ongoing legislation, it is probable that forum owners may be only company owners or members of Journalism Guilds, as well.