Cleaning out some dead wood...

I just recently deleted a bunch of banned accounts that had zero posts to them and haven't been logged into this site for a year, so you may have noticed the registered member total drop about 2,000 from the count prior to the pruning. I figure those accounts were just taking up space needlessly, and it didn't make sense to keep them in the database. Most of them were spammers anyway, who had their threads deleted as they were being banned permanently.

I'm planning on whacking old registered accounts that have apparently been abandoned. These will be accounts that have zero posts and have not been visited within the past year. This will chop 37,399 obsolete members from the site.

I guess it does make me wonder what happened to all those members who took the time to register here over the years but never participated in any way....

Anyway, with 80,000 member names tied up, it's getting harder and harder for new members to find a member name that they would like to have that is not already being used. So this will free up a BUNCH of them. Not to mention that deleting those accounts will free up some room on the server that all those records were tying up in the database needlessly. Been getting notices that my server disk space is getting close to being filled up, so hopefully this will help some.

Bear in mind that current members are discouraged from changing member names by simply registering a new one, so please don't plan on checking for another name after this has taken place and grabbing up a name via a new registration. The preferred method to do this is via a paid membership which carries with it the perk of having your member name changed by request via a PM to me. Any members making duplicate accounts to bypass this procedure will have those new accounts either blocked at registration, or if found after the fact, have the new accounts deleted.

What?? How dare you delete accounts! This is a conspiracy to make everyone pay for stuff!!

Kidding. I just wanted to post what you'd almost expect to be posted since someone will always object to anything you do. I'm amazed there's that many registered names that never actually posted or did anything. Don't understand why it's be that popular to do so. Hopefully a lot of free space is created.

Very smart Rich

After looking at the figures, I decided to just delete members that haven't logged in within the past two years and have zero posts, rather than one year. That accounted for 30,829 deletions, so I figure that will be good enough for now.

Surprisingly enough there were 15,449 members who hadn't logged in within the past FIVE years.

Surprisingly enough there were 15,449 members who hadn't logged in within the past FIVE years.

I was going to say that part doesn't surprised me as much - when the registration process was automated, a lot of people DID just create new accounts whenever they wanted....but then I remembered that these were zero post accounts.
One possibility is that without being registered, one cannot view attached images - I know I've registered on more than one site to see pictures in a thread I came across in a search, and never returned to that site again.
Aside from that, keeping reptiles is a short term hobby for a lot of people...and, for some, a building interest is squashed before it gets off the ground.

I must admit, that's one reason why I registered.
Then I decided to stick around
Also, apparently linking to a thread doesn't work if the person receiving it isn't registered, so they might register just to read that thread. (I'm not sure if it's all threads though)

Lol after reading that there were so many non active accounts I don't feel too bad about my original account that I abandoned. It was made so I could see pics and such but when I realized how awesome it actually was in here I made a legit one