by Guest Tue Sep 04, 2012 9:45 am
Let me try and explain this issue from a different angle for you Marr. Your heart is in the right place; you want the forums to be active, you want the active members to feel like they make a difference and they're a big part of the community, these are the things you want to accomplish with a member clean up. You also feel like the inactive members don't contribute anything so why should we keep them around if they don't even want to take 10 minutes out of their lives every few weeks to come visit?
Well, the thing is, while those members haven't done anything for us, we haven't done anything for them. We don't have the tools to keep people coming back here unless they really like what they see. Our job is to make new people want to come and want to stay. We haven't been doing our job, so the inactive users haven't been doing theirs. Cleaning up the members now isn't going to fix the problem of large inactivity. When you do something like this, it's to fix a problem. Inactivity is a problem, but the root isn't 0 post users. The root of our inactivity problem is being unable to keep people coming back.
Basically, the reason I and a few others keep disagreeing with your idea is because even if the inactive members are cleaned up, it doesn't fix anything. New members will come and join the forum, those members won't feel like there's enough to do here and they'll become inactive 0 post accounts as well. In another few months we'll need to do another clean-up and the problem still won't be addressed. How often do you come on the forums and see highlighted forums because there are new posts in them? Maybe a few threads a day get posted in a couple times a day by a couple users. That is nowhere near active enough to say that we need a member purge. So basically, yes, inactivity is a problem, but deleting accounts won't solve the problem, so there's no reason to do it right now.