Old inactive members

Dusting the corners

[Rosalind]

It's 2006, and this year my site will be 3 years old. That means that there are members who have been around for that kind of time, many of whom haven't checked back in for quite some time. It's time to send them all reminder emails to suggest they log in again and say hi before their registrations lapse.

Is there any consensus on how long to give it before you retire old profiles? Some kind of happy medium that won't upset the forum members, but that means the site isn't full of hopelessly out of date information?

[shigamoto]

I usually stick with a year, but I know sites who have about 6-months. It isn't an easy task to remove hard earned members so be careful. But still one can't let a number of dead-beats take server storage if they aren't using the service.

[forumgirl]

Interesting, have never heard of a forum actually deleting members because they are inactive for a period of time. Actually that's really not a good idea to tell you the truth. They will wonder why they are unable to login, if they try later. They will perhaps want to use their same user id and they may not be able to. They may not wish to register again, as it would look like they had two accounts.

[Rosalind]

Interesting, have never heard of a forum actually deleting members because they are inactive for a period of time. Actually that's really not a good idea to tell you the truth.

Well, I've settled on 2 years as my expiry period. I know it seems bizarre to be rejecting members when most forum owners struggle to keep them. But a lot of the email addresses bounce after a while, and details get out of date. My particular forum is first and foremost a meeting place, so it's going to be frustrating for the active members when they keep trying to contact people who aren't responding.

The other thing is, when you have a lot of members, the unpleasant truth is that some of them will have died.

[larryhatch]

Why not simply delete email addresses that bounce? Those are worthless anyway.

This allows seemingly inactive members to lurk without actually participating.
Some people hate to write, afraid of sounding dumb (maybe because they are).
It doesn't mean they are disinterested in the topic.
On the contrary, they must have had an interest to register in the first place. -Larry

[rogerd]

I'd differentiate in a couple of ways:

* Members who never posted vs. those that have posts

* Date of Last Visit

Once there are posts from a particular name, you probably don't want to delete that member. (Database-driven sites may convert posts by that member to some kind of generic name, like "guest". Old threads could be littered with undifferentiated posts.)