Pruning Members/Posts?
- Thread starter conorod
- Start date
CyberFreak
Legendary Typer
The only good use is if you need to cut your DB size quickly and easily such as if your host has limits on the DB size.
roleplaying
Familiar Face
Old members can always come back. I did that with my first forum and it back fired really badly. You can always get members to come back via mass email. I don't even delete my banned members, unless they were a major threat to my forum.
CyberFreak
Legendary Typer
There is nothing i find more annoying then being active on a forum then coming back a month or 2 later t find out my account has been deleted. It has happened quite a few times to me and i find it annoying i have to start again.
Not bad. Heres why. I disabled all my spambot protection awhile back, and had massive signups. Wasnt until a few days later I figured out how to beat them properly. Now, each member must make an intro thread (1 post) in order to see the site. For the remodel I plan to prune all members with less than 1 post, thus deleting all spam bots that may have joined -🙂-
Black Angel
Resident
Ghost said:
Yep, I used to do that too.. On the forum I run with my brother, we would delete the accounts with 0 posts every 90 days, but not before sending at least 2 or 3 mass emails warning them of their pending deletion.. and if you counted periodic email regarding major updates to the board, it was more than that.
Some would come back, while most did not, and those accounts were deleted. Many of them would re-register just to do the same thing. When they were deleted again, about half would then re-register and post a bit.
I don't have a spambot issue anymore since having moved to a better host, and I haven't pruned accounts since before I left IF.. but I am tempted to start again since I have 435 members, and 185 or so of them haven't posted at all.. I probably won't though..
I agree that pruning members with 0 posts isn' a bad idea because having too many members when you haven't many posts would look like you either:
A. Had a lot of spambots. or
B. You made a bunch of fake accounts to make your board appear to be more active than it really was.
I think that a board with 300 members and 15,000 posts will look better than a board that has 3,000 members and 15,000 posts.. because it is 50 posts per member versus 5 posts per member.. that is, assuming that the majority of those posts weren't made by the staff.
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