Do you keep or delete 0-posts member accounts?

[Cedric]

As an admin, you might have noticed that some member accounts on your forum have been sitting idle for a long time without any post count to their names. This can be a concern, especially if you want your forum to be active and engaging for your users.

So, what should you do with these inactive accounts? Do you delete them or just let them be?

An option I'd recommend is to send a friendly email to these members and ask them if they are still interested in being a part of the forum. Perhaps they signed up in a moment of curiosity or with the intention of coming back later, but life got in the way. A friendly reminder might encourage them to become active members, and you never know what valuable contributions they could make to your community.

If you don't get a response, you might consider deleting the account after a certain period of inactivity. This will free up space on your forum and make it easier to manage. However, it's not like it takes much database space too.

 

[Cory]

I keep the accounts for the following reasons:

• You never know when someone may return to your community.
• You could make them upset when they return because they wanted the username they originally had and someone else took it.
• If you keep deleting inactive accounts, your member stats count will go down and that may make viewers less likely to join. On the flip side, if they look at the member list and see almost all accounts have 0 posts, that could also make them less likely to join.
• In my case, my forum is more for viewing than posting due to it being primarily used for resources, so it's understandable to have 0-post accounts.

 

[Reverie]

I was thinking of creating this thread - but looked and found it was already made.

I have considered deleting accounts, kind of purging, the ones with 0 posts - but this was back in the day where it was more likely spam bots that were joining forums. Strange usernames and emails. Now a days - it's mostly real users with the 0 posts and perhaps they only lurk from time to time. In that case I would keep the users, because perhaps they are benefiting from the forum but do not want to interact. If you see someone lurking perhaps reach out and tell them hello. As long as they are benefiting from the forum, I think that's all that matters in the end.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I usually wait a little bit to delete accounts with 0 posts. Sometimes people will join a forum and forget that they joined, then months later they'll come back and see that they already had an account on a forum and log in to start posting. This has happened to me before, I joined a forum and didn't have time to post on the forum right away so I told myself that I would return later on in the evening and make a few posts. That didn't happen, until I tried registering on the forum about a month later and realized that I had never made a post. :V

 

[Moonface]

I've only purged zero post accounts once in my entire time running a forum, and that was back on ZetaBoards where we had dozens of accounts that hadn't been used in any way since joining (including simply registering and then logging out immediately) so I deleted any that had never been used at all for years. Doubt I'd do it now but I did back then as it had been about 8 years worth of accounts piling up that hadn't done anything except register.

 

[Kyng]

Usually I keep them for a reasonable length of time... I've had a couple of them start posting a full 3 years after they joined .

(I didn't bother re-registering them when I moved from ZetaBoards to MyBB, though... would've been way too much effort!)

 

[Xilia]

I understand people want to just creep on sites....but it honestly bugs me. I give them 3 months/90 days to make a post. Otherwise, I delete the account. It's a good way to potentially avoid slow downs with site loading and what not.