Inactive users

[CarpCharacin]

Why do some forum owners choose to delete inactive users? There is this one fish forum that has deleted almost all of its users http://www.arofanatics.com/forums/

[BirdOPrey5]

Seems best you ask them why they did it, how can we know?

I've seen posts from a lot of admins over the years who feel deleting inactive users is important but it's just their personal preference to do so, no reason anyone has to.

[MarkFL]

I could see perhaps deleting long inactive users who have never posted, but otherwise I would choose to leave the accounts intact in case a user does decide to return.

[Replicant]

As of recently, I had almost 200 users on my board. 130 of those users logged in one time or hadn't logged in after the first week they were a member and never posted. These people were either looking at something specific they had to be a member to see or the site wasn't what they were looking for. My delete user attributes are if they have never posted, been a member over 90 days, never logged in after the first week of membership. I have several members who login once a month or so just to check in but have never posted. I'm ok with that, but the others, I don't want them cluttering the memberlist with empty no face avatars and wasting a perfectly good really cool username.

[TheLastSuperman]

On many forums a majority of it's member base are spambots, due to a number of factors/reasons. When you have a large number of "bots" or members who have never posted you should simply move them to an inactive usergroup without posting permissions in my opinion as I see no reason to delete a spambot type of account when another registration attempt takes place.

The reason you move inactive and spambot members to a specific "junk" usergroup is to count the actual number of valid members from other usergroups who actually interact with the site IF you want to provide some form of honest credentials aside from basic site traffic stats etc.

[Lynne]

I delete members that haven't logged in for a year and have never posted. I have a tracker on the site and when I was on a less powerful server, I found the site worked better if I kept my userbase around 80,000 instead of the over 200,000 I had at the time I made that decision. I decided to continue to keep my userbase at around 80K or so.

[CarpCharacin]

I asked them and they didn't respond. I had an account on there, but it got pruned. If you look at the last page in the fish subforums, most of the posts are posts from deleted users.

[Paul M]

I never delete accounts, on any forum.

Its pretty pointless and achives nothing except maybe freeing up a bit of space on your database servers hard drive.

[Zachariah]

I always trim dead weight.

[Dave]

I don't delete inactive users. Even if I were to do so, I would only delete users that haven't ever made any posts and haven't been on the forum for a long time.