Inactive forum registrations

[TVB]

What do you do with them? Prune them, write them and ask what's up? What about the ones who register but never post????

Thanks,

Betsy

[Bill211]

I don't do anything with them. I figure, especially by the nature of my message board (and yours), many of them register, but only "lurk".

I track who visits the forums pretty closely, and I often see folks that have registered, but never posted, visit the forums on a regular basis. I'm hesitant to remove any I haven't seen, simply because they may be visiting when I'm not looking.

I also figure, aside from the space to hold the member data, there's little overhead from registered users who never post.

Lastly, sometimes I see such people finally work up the nerve to actually post, but it often takes them months before they feel comfortable enough to do so.

I wish there were some accurate way to guage whether people have actually returned to at least READ the forums, but given that they don't have to "sign in", coupled with AOL type IP addresses, there's just no good way to know.

[Mandi]

I ran a support based site for awhile too. I chose to prune the inactives at 12 months. My reasoning was that if someone didn't visit for a year, they typically registered anew anyway if they did come back - and then became confused when the program wouldn't let them.

Alternatively - if they had a new email address (common for my userbase, as we all move a lot) it WOULD let them register a fresh profile, and then the old one really was dead weight. I bet I only had five or six people ever ask "what happened to my username?" in several years. I'd just explain that it got trimmed away, but they were welcome to re-register.

I also pruned away people who registered but never came back after that initial visit - I think I pruned those around 60 days. Don't forget to sort out the users who register but don't confirm the registration (assuming you're set up that way to start with) - those are usually bad email addys, or truly disintrested folks. Those I pruned around 30 days, I think. I performed this sort of pruning about once a month, so in reality I was getting rid of those everytime.

One thing I really like(d) about vBulletin was the ability to sort the users according to these types of criteria. It was easy enough to leave the lurkers alone, as their recently-logged in status left them off the inactive search results. (Assuming you don't mind lurkers.)

[TVB]

Thanks to both of you...

I'll probably just leave them...

Betsy