Member cull

[TimothyEllis]

I've just done a cull of the member list, deleting any member who never posted, and last logged in before about 400 days ago.

Some 900 odd gone.

But I think most of them were spammers who gave up trying here.

Or people who had a look, and then never came back.

Spammer activity is major at the moment, and it's had me looking at the list, since half of them register, but don't log in for a month or so.

I'm thinking about a more pro-active delete if not logged in the first time within a day policy.

Comments?

[Vijaya]

Good riddance. However, I'd give a new member a grace period to get acclimated before deleting them. A day is hardly sufficient time to browse through the posts, etc. Maybe a month? Newbies can be shy.

[TimothyEllis]

Good riddance. However, I'd give a new member a grace period to get acclimated before deleting them. A day is hardly sufficient time to browse through the posts, etc. Maybe a month? Newbies can be shy.

True.

But they only see about 1/3 the site without logging in. Logging in gets them the rest.

Hardly any point to registering and never logging in. You're still a guest that way.

[Bill Hiatt]

You don't need to be logged in to lurk, even though you can only lurk on 1/3 of the site. Some people are just shy, though I suppose the very shy wouldn't bother to register.

[TimothyEllis]

You don't need to be logged in to lurk, even though you can only lurk on 1/3 of the site. Some people are just shy, though I suppose the very shy wouldn't bother to register.

Yeah. People don't need to register to read the public stuff. You do that to read the private stuff and opt in.

[alhawke]

I used to lurk before posting on sites for a while. New writers can be bashful. But if you're able to see them not logging on, I'd think a year of not logging on is uninterested enough. Can they still re-join?

I'm thinking about a more pro-active delete if not logged in the first time within a day policy.

I'd give a week or two. I've been known to sign up for things but not get around to doing much with them initially.

Whatever policy you've had for spammers, it's working. That sure has decreased here since a year ago.

[TimothyEllis]

I used to lurk before posting on sites for a while. New writers can be bashful. But if you're able to see them not logging on, I'd think a year of not logging on is uninterested enough. Can they still re-join?
...
Whatever policy you've had for spammers, it's working. That sure has decreased here since a year ago.

The back end of the forum has reports, so never logged in is a real thing I can see. It also shows how many days it's been since someone last logged in. So when someone hasn't logged in for 2000 days, and never posted anything, I think it's safe to say they never will.

Yes, people can register again.

It's not so much a policy, as an effective strategy. I redid the base privileges, so until you get a post approved, they don't show up to anyone but me. And until you get that first one approved, you can't send PM's or do anything but read. So none of it gets seen by anyone but me.

We're averaging several dozen spam posts a day at the moment. Varies a bit. Some days I get 30 or 40 attempts to register, but only 6 or so actually do.

There could be genuine people who don't get their activation emails because of gmail and hotmail, but looking at the names, I doubt it's many. And they can email me using the help address on the forum to get activated if they need to.

[Post-Crisis D]

I'm only logged in on one computer.  On the others, I just browse the publicly available areas.  There is still plenty to read there so it is conceivable that someone might register in anticipation of becoming an active poster but then just lurk for a while and not bother to login until something compels them to jump in and post.

But, I would bet that most forum registrations are bots.  That was the case when I had open registrations on my forums years ago and I'm sure it is even worse now.

For people that register and don't activate, on the registration success page, I would put up a notice that they will receive an activation eMail and they'll need to click that link to finalize their registration and that accounts not activated within 10 days will be deleted.  Then, information on how to contact you if they don't receive the activation eMail.  Of course, that's assuming you don't have something like that already.

I know that sometimes when I've had problems registering on a site, I might wait a day or so before contacting the site just because I get busy or whatever.  So, 7 or 10 days or something gives legitimate people trying to register a good amount of time to complete the activation or contact you.

Also, deleting incomplete registrations also prevents problems with people trying to register and then the system saying, well, you're already registered.  Or whatever.  I've had that too where I couldn't register because I didn't receive the activation eMail and then couldn't try again at a later date because the account I tried to set up was still there.

Also, there's a trend these days where people don't want to have contact with actual people, so having to send you an eMail to activate their account is going to be a no-go for them.

[CaptnAndy]

Damned Well Done!