Inactive Accounts - Delete or not to Delete?

[Short of Daybreak]

I do activity checks on one of my forums and probably I should do it with all of them. That way, it gives the user a warning ahead of time that if they don't make the activity check (without saying they were going to be away for a period of time) their account will be deleted. My roleplay has become very inactive recently, so I plan to have a fresh start and clean it up by deleting all character profiles, all the threads, tweaking the plot and rules, and making a better profile application form. I plan to totally revamp the site and hopefully, it will be very active once again!

[Kallison]

Yeah, I generally do activity checks as well. This way, I give them perhaps a week's time to post before they are notified. After the check, I give them two to three days notice before I delete inactive accounts. This is excluding members who have given notice of their absences, of course.

I believe it's better to delete the inactive accounts. For example, I have my wolf roleplay. Sure, at times it may appear like I have an overly inactive board, but then I clean out the inactive accounts. Just like that, it looks more active because instead of having 75 accounts and ten or fifteen posts a day, I have say... 50 accounts. Still not the greatest stats, but it shows that people are making an effort to post.

[Smurfy]

For a starting forum, keeping accounts would be a great help in advertising. If they can match these figures with good topics and posts, then they will no doubt gain some more active members. For a forum more developed, getting rid of inactive members can be a benefit for advertising by stating that ALL of it's members are active and form a strengthened community.

So really, it depends how you want your forum to progress and how stable it is. Stating that you have gotten rid of useless accounts on the forum might bring a bit of life back into it if you have member's getting bored and not returning so often.

[Thunderluff]

On most of the role-plays I am on and I own there are activety checks. The other admin and I on our forum we do monthly activety checks. It seemingly just makes the forum look neater and it possibly would scare members away if we had a lot of members when the truth is that only thirty are active. When we do have activety checks we post a warning, PM everyone, and send out a via email to everyone for a warning about it. We gave them a week and a few days and if they don't come then we delete them and if they have any characters they go up fo adoption. Simple xD

[Lovely[lovely]]

I have activity checks on my forum, but I make sure that every member has enough time to post. I don't delete them unless they don't post for two activity checks, and I have the activity checks about a month apart and leave them up for ten days. I think deleting inactive members is helpful to guests who are thinking of joining. If you have a bunch of members who aren't active it can be misleading to guests, and could result in more inactive when they join and discover that there are less active members than they thought. But I think it is important to give people a long time before deleting their account. They would have to be inactive for a while for me to delete them. I also have a board so members can post if they know they won't be on for a while.

Overall I think having a few active members is better than having lots of inactive members.

[gloomy sunday.]

When I started my first forum, I planned to delete inactive accounts. But, when the time came, I just didn't have the heart. Even though they didn't go on, the people were my friends on other forums and they were kind enough to join it in the first place.
I don't know, I guess I'm on the fence about this issue...
I haven't deleted any, I guess it's for a higher member count and I'm afraid that miraculously, they'll come back and start posting again.


So, I don't delete accounts because I don't want them to think I don't like them or want them on my forum, I guess.

[Angelique St. Clare]

What I've started doing, instead of deleting inactive accounts, is this: I created a member group that is "inactive accounts" and I placed the members who hadn't logged in in at least 3 months, into that member group. I also created a forum for Inactive Characters and placed their profiles there. This shows new members that there are inactive characters on the site, rather than deleting them completely. I can't bring myself to delete people who were once active, because I always hope they'll come back. I just had a member who had been gone since September return to active posting a week ago. So it does happen.

[Dee]

Feb 17, 2008 7:34:11 GMT -8 Deputy Fife said:

I never do because it makes me feel like I am trying to blackmail my members into being active, threats never work. You never know, you might terminate a members profile who might have just posted and BEEN an active member 3 weeks down the road but now won't because they are ticked off about being told what to do.

I dont delete either, for the same reasons. The nature of my forum is energetic by and large, and many people sign up to lurk the private boards, quietly, to read, and absorb the shared material there.

These people fade into the woodwork, and most never return, but some of them have. I have seen people who joined 3 years ago, go MIA, never post, never log in, then out of the blue one day they turn up.

It's about comfort, I wouldn't want to remove someone just to balance out stats.

Just my 2 cents ;D

[gloomy sunday.]

Yeah, I wouldn't want to delete a person from my forum. Just to balance the stats. That doesn't seem right to me. I know it's just a forum, but it can mean a lot to somebody.
On a Selena Gomez forum (not mine) a girl who hadn't been on since November just logged on and started posting!
So, yeah, I always have hope that they're going to remember or just come back.

[Negative]

Um, even though I just got my first board a few days ago open, I plan on deleting the inactive members once about every 4 months. I sure hope that's good, cause I wont know yet.

[Enchant]

Jun 7, 2008 10:21:20 GMT -8 Negative said:

Um, even though I just got my first board a few days ago open, I plan on deleting the inactive members once about every 4 months. I sure hope that's good, cause I wont know yet.

Welcome to Proboards and the discussion board. I am glad you could join in, just in the future, make sure that you have a minimum of four sentences. If you make a comment, back it up with person experience or reasoning. Thank you.

[nevvy]

I usually do activity checks every month. In the rules, it says that there are monthly activity checks. I give the members 10 days to post, and after 10 days, I delete all the inactive accounts. They're welcome to come back, and members have come back and said that they're sorry that they didn't post that they were away or that they had forgotten about the site. Otherwise, there are many accounts that go inactive and we have characters all around that are inactive. So, with the activity checks, we get to clean up the boards, give the herds(because I own a wild horse forum) that have inactive leads to people that want them and clean up the joining boards. It's been a great system for me.

[Friendship Gal]

If my board grows more members I will eventually delete those who have never posted.

I just checked my security logs and found out that a user can actually delete their own account, which is unusual I think for other forums. I wonder if that can be turned off so that only admin can delete an account.

[HoudiniDerek]

Jun 8, 2008 5:38:57 GMT -8 Friendship Gal said:

If my board grows more members I will eventually delete those who have never posted.

I just checked my security logs and found out that a user can actually delete their own account, which is unusual I think for other forums. I wonder if that can be turned off so that only admin can delete an account.

I would not want it where only an admin can delete people. I prefer it that the member have the say over where to be active or not...and if they decide against staying, they can delete. If only admins could do it, there might be a lot of times where they would not delete just to keep member counts higher. It might be more work on the admin to do activity checks and such, but at least they can delete their own if they want.

[MISS']

On my sites, I do activity checks. Both of my sites are roleplaying games, so it is really important have active members, and not inactive ones...especially because of play bys and all that jazz. When I do the activity checks, I don't email people about it, like some sites do, I just PM all accounts. That way, the people who sign on, and who are truly active will sign the activity checks, and there will be no those that just come on for the activity check.

If I had a non rpg site, though..I would've just left all acounts and maybe sent emails to get people back.