Forums General Discussion Suggestion: Deleting zero time posters who........

There’s obviously a ridiculous amount of zero posters registered as you can tell by going into the User List. How about deleting the zero posters who haven’t logged in for 13 months (that’s twelve months with a one month gratis). As for one time posters, perhaps make it 48 months?

To what end? There's no harm done just by existing on a database, and as for removing one-time posters it complicates things like searching by user, finding all user's posts, linking user's profiles when viewing their posts, etc.. Why make extra work and changes to the forums (making it harder to upgrade) when there's no gain from it?

agreed. It's not really a big deal.

48 months? That is 4 years, FOUR! Lots of things change in 4 years... You are looking way to far into the future.

Wouldn't deleting abandoned accounts reduce the workload on the server and lower the database size? I doubt such an option doesn't already exist (though I'm not sure how it would effect posts etc. for that user).

That said, I've never seen the forums falter, so I guess it isn't really an issue currently.

Any modern RDBMS is designed to handle millions of records and more, a 50000 record database is hardly gumming up the works. If you consider the size of the user records etc. and make some estimates on how many people fill in user info and how much space that takes up in the database the entire user database file with all user options probably comes to around 25MB. Now, consider the fact that there are 97000 posts on the forums and how much space each of those takes up and you're looking at upwards of 100MB for that database, yet the forum searches are extremely fast so I hardly think there's anything to be concerned about.

If it did become an issue it would be up to Khaled/Tjerk to decide how to fix it, I don't understand why any forum user would be so conerned with what happens to zero-posters' accounts, yet there've been several of these threads brought up that I can recall. Go figure.

I don't think it's that important - There are some people who are registered for quite a long time, and never post anything until 8+ months later when they see an interesting thread they would like to participate in. We've got no problems with the currently registered users and the current system works fine, and always has. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" as they say.

Regards,

So, if I reply to a post in a non-meaningful way (like this) every now and then, I will be safe from having my name removed!

Cheers,

DK