One of the other message boards I belong to just did this, and I was wondering whether or not the SDMB does it as well: if a member’s account is inactive for x number of days, or only has, say, one post and it’s from 2001, do their accounts get purged from the bored? If so, what are the guidelines for determining their deletion, and if not, well, why not?
Sorry if this has been covered, but nothing came up in the search I just tried, for ‘purge’ in ATMB, and I didn’t want to run the hamsters any more ragged than I had to.
No. User accounts remain in existence forever. At least, until now we have seen no reason to remove inactive accounts. I’m sure it makes for a cleaner database, but then again, what’s 28,000 user names, when compared to nearly 3 million posts?
So, in short: purging inactive accounts wouldn’t greatly speed up the boards or improve things in any other way. Plus, people DO come back after long periods of inactivity, sometimes.
a lot of old people who never post lurk. I am constantly seeing 1999ers posting that i have never heard of, with like under 300 posts. there are probably people who registered years ago and have posted like twice, but read every day
Also don’t forget that those old posts belonging to the “inactive” accounts still exist. You wouldn’t be able to purge the old accounts and still leave the posts where they are (at least, I think you wouldn’t).
Slashdot placed a link to a thread on their front page last week. Many MANY newbies showed up to post in it. It’s a safe bet that most of them won’t ever come back.
From older versions of the software, when non-registered posting was supported. In the current version of vb that is used here, I’m not sure what would happen if you tried to delete a poster without deleting the post, but I don’t think it’d be saving the server anything.
Ah, I didn’t get what you were saying. Sorry. The mods and admins have ways of checking IP addresses and things of that nature, though if the person were to never post…
However, reading what you did mean… I don’t know. I’m sure someone will be along shortly to explain it to you.
Well, not entirely. I don’t think unregistered posting was ever supported. The old posts without a handle usually seem to be the ones that occured in the UBB era, by posters who never bothered to post in the vB era. Seems the database will only “name” the old posts if it can actively identify the user ID from the “new” database, or so it seems. Name changes, same thing. You can find old UBB era posts with a username attached to it that’s since been changed. Same poster, same user ID even: different name. One of those conversion glitches, I suppose.
A couple of thousand would mean a helluvalot of work. I seriously don’t think anyone has that much time on their hands. However, some rather insubordinate banned posters have in the past created multiple usernames in a row. Probably in the order of 20, 25 names, tops. Other than a hardly indicative rise in the “Number of members” figure, it doesn’t affect the board any more than posting 20 or 25 posts does.
Coldfire, what about the old-school posts you’ll come across every once in a while under the username Guest and the status “N/A”?
BrightEyes, somebody would know (assuming it were possible for somebody to create a couple thousand usernames in a row). I’m confident that anything along those lines that was significant enough to impact board performance would be quickly identified and dealt with by the administration of the board. They have ways to prevent abuse like that from continuing.
This board has never allowed posting by unregistered posters. Blank posts (no username) and those identified as “Guest” or with status “N/A” were made by registered members before the software switchover.
Yes, in vBulletin you can delete Members, and the posts remain. They simply have no Member name attached to them. You can also choose to delete the Members and their posts.
No, the number of Members would have to be an absolutely insane amount for the Board speed to be affected in any really noticeable way. Like in the hundreds of thousands or so.
It is very easy to delete/ban/move Members using “Move/Prune” in the Admin Control panel.
“a lot of old people who never post lurk. I am constantly seeing 1999ers posting that i have never heard of, with like under 300 posts. there are probably people who registered years ago and have posted like twice, but read every day”
That’s true.
And yes, we are still watching. Be Afraid.
