Will you remove inactive forum members?

[Shawn Gossman]

Will you ever remove inactive forum members from your community?

Is there ever an appropriate time to practice this?

Do you think it can be used to get inactive members to become active again? You'd email them that their account will be removed and then hope they become active.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this topic.

Personally, I don't think I would unless somehow inactive member accounts were becoming a resource hog.

 

[Elseb]

Never seen the point personally, I don't really see the benefits of removing members. Surely a higher member count is another reason for a potential member to join? Who knows.

 

[Dilip]

Not unless they are causing an unwanted load on the database. In most cases, they are welcome to rejoin the discussions.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Not unless they are causing an unwanted load on the database. In most cases, they are welcome to rejoin the discussions.

If they were, I would think there would be an add-on to "disable" the technical lookup of some of the account until it became active.

I don't know how hard that would be.

 

[Dilip]

It will be a nice feature. Banned accounts, bots, fun registrations, abandoned accounts etc do contribute to DB size. And, it will add to the backup size as well.

Does MySQL store when a particular Record was accessed the last time?

 

[Shawn Gossman]

It will be a nice feature. Banned accounts, bots, fun registrations, abandoned accounts etc do contribute to DB size. And, it will add to the backup size as well.

Does MySQL store when a particular Record was accessed the last time?

I just feel like there should be a way to "ignore" "calling those users and groups" aside from general moderation.

But that's beyond my ability.

Someone said there isn't a big hit on XenForo forums so there is no reason to delete members.

 

[Dilip]

To ignore them, you will first need to categorise them. Create a table called inactive_members. But if the info is not fetched, the poster_info area will look odd.

Say Jerry has not posted in the last 2 years, we can ignore fetching their details. But the poster area would have no info to display. There will need another record to replace the inactive member info. Something like a placeholder which is available for Deleted Member, who has no info to show.

 

[Dilip]

CREATE Table inactive_users

select * FROM users WHERE last_active = 1

The above is not perfect, but it more or less can segregate the inactive users into a new table.