Accounts with 0 posts

[Nebulous]

Do you do anything with accounts that have zero posts? Do you delete them after a couple months? Leave them alone?

 

[meetdilip]

For a couple of months, no.

 

[Deleted member 17779]

At the moment, I don't have any accounts that are at 0.

I know some people get rid of them after 60 days or 90 days or something like that. I haven't made up my mind yet what I would do with them if I did get any on my forum.

 

[MrDawn]

They're not hurting anything. Might as well not waste your time deleting the account. You could probably use it as a sock account to add content to your forum if no one ever comes back and claims it.

 

[Katrina]

I leave the accounts alone. Some of them are people who want to read things with the potential to post in the future. My sister signed up on Christianity Haven in the first year and she gets some emails of threads she was interested in whenever there's a response. She has never posted though.

 

[Carlos X]

For the most part, I do leave them alone. BUT, I do purge these zero posts every 3 years or when a site breaks a milestone. I've already purged accounts with zero posts in 4 Forums already. CoDForums is the only website left alone, because I want to break 20,000 members for PR reasons. I will purge the accounts afterwards.

 

[Page]

They just stay and I do nothing with them. I know that sites out there do remove them after X amount of days to weeks to months, I mean they have their reasons why. Keep the site clean and keep it down. Makes sense for a very large website. I just leave them alone as I'm small and if I do remove them, 85% of all would be 0 content 😛

emails of threads

shame that not all would work, I have members join using a temp email or email that they use then not use anymore and so emails never does get to them

 

[zappaDPJ]

I generally keep them although I have been known to have a major purge but only if they have been dormant for many years. The only reason I have to remove them is to re-balance the post to member ratio or reallocate the user name if a member requests it.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I currently don't have any accounts with 0 posts on either community. However, if I did I would keep their account around for a little bit. Perhaps they forgot they joined the community? I've done that before, I joined a forum before and randomly remembered that I joined and started posting.

 

[meetdilip]

It is hard when you have upgraded privileges for old users. I have seen spammers register and quietly leave until a time that account has elevated privileges.

 

[Deleted member 49125]

When I first started, I deleted accounts if they didn't come back on. Then I read of another point of view of keeping accounts because you never know if someone may come back, forgot their account, etc. Who am I to tell someone they have to log on & post. They took the time to register; they should have the option to come back at any time.

 

[Moonface]

Generally I've left them alone. There was a time on the ZB version of my board though where I opted to remove any 0 post accounts that were inactive for 5+ years though as the number of them grew quite a bit over the course of that iterations almost decade long tenure.

 

[USHost247]

I just typically leave them alone. Some people get an account just to login and read articles/posts and not necessarily participate.

 

[Demon_skeith]

I've been deleting them at the end of each month, that way I can get a true count of active users who signed up in the past month.

 

[KnownSyntax]

I leave accounts alone (although those that are pending activation, are cleaned up yearly) unless people request their data be deleted, or other aspects.

 

[leangreen76]

I just typically leave them alone. Some people get an account just to login and read articles/posts and not necessarily participate.

I feel like they can do that as guest though, unless it's a message board where the majority are private forums - but that to me is a real turn off.

 

[Linzii]

I was a member of one forum where they automatically deleted accounts that had not gotten at least ten posts in thirty days. It was a forum where server resources were more or less limited, and while I'm not sure if it had as much impact as it was intended to have, it rarely caused any issues either.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I typically don't do anything.

When I had a "big board" (10,000+ members), I did purge every year to help control resource use.

 

[Nomad]

I don't delete accounts with zero posts. I have problems with the accounts with spam posts.

 

[Shortie_]

I never delete any accounts whether they have 100 posts or 0 posts. Some people register and then tend to come back and just lurk before becoming an active member and that to me is fine as I know what it can be like for those that have social anxiety how they may feel about being active before they know how things work. If I was to delete an account because they hadn't posted that could put them off ever wanting to come back.