I was bored and looking through the member list. There is 200 pages, or 6003 accounts with 0 posts. That's a pretty substantial amount. Running a vbulletin script to remove accounts over 3-6 months old with 0 posts should free up a bit of database performance.
6 months to a year seems more reasonable. However some people may wanna register with the site only to have a look and browse around the site
Daytime has a good point. Rather than checking how old the accounts are, it would be more effective if it checked their last active date. If they have 0 posts and haven't been on in about 6 months... then delete them. I do that for my forum.
Last time I pruned users, I wound up deleting people who just lurked, never logged on or whatever. Removing them is a pain and not worth the effort or the resulting angry emails.
I know plenty of people who are lurking in forums on a regular basis, yet never participate and therefore have 0 posts. That's different from dead accounts though, members who haven't been online in years. I think if you haven't logged in at least once a year, nobody can expect that it won't get deleted. That doesn't include accounts with, I'd say, 10 or more posts. Just to include the recent example of AntiPasta's deletion, that wasn't how the rules should have been applied.
I think given how old the site is 3 years or more before deletion. We have people who came back after having kids, etc. I'd be willing to prune >5 year old accounts or send them messages to log in again.
yea... I was away for years before kind of returned now... after two kids... and less money... and less time... and less/no space to put my consoles T^T
I sent a mass email to people who haven't logged in in over a year, after a week or two I will prune the zero post account no one has logged into for five years.
One of those must have been me from years ago... Came back one day to find my account gone and had to re-register :crying: Managed to keep my username though. Oh also I didn't have 0 posts, just not logged in for a while.
Yeah, I think we all avoid them... ;-) Good to see we'll be having some pruning finally. It wasn't quite right last time - several users who had posted but hadn't come online in a while got deleted, including AntiPasta, LeGIt, adam-james, NfG (Lawrence) and my friend Gavindo. Deleting 0 posters who haven't logged in for years seems like a safe bet, though.
well have it make a user at least intro them selves to have 1 post and they be good. Better than zero?
I had this very discussion years ago on dcemulation.com with the admins there. There was significantly more than 200 pages (probably 2000) of 0 post users. It did finally get pruned but only because of some mysql issues that it was having. I know I lurk on several forums without posting, but if my account disappears because of it I have no right to get pissed off. Their forums, their rules.
