Don’t be impressed by the number of members you see on many forums. Most, including that other senior one, do not allow people to delete their accounts. It’s an ad revenue thing. I’m not denying them the right to make money, but they should be upfront about the policy. I’m amazed at the number of people who think anything on the internet is done for nothing.
One reason for not removing any members is because the person who wants to have their account deleted has comments on the forum. So, suppose I left this forum , and they deleted my account. What would it say for a name on all of the posts I made ? “Deleted member”, maybe ? (Sort of like the RIP avatar posts ) If there were no meaningful name, then over time you would have a bunch of posts from people who quit and were deleted with no name or avatar, or way to tell which posts were from which deleted person. And if you deleted all of a person’s comments, then the forum would have strange breaks in the dialogue. What Ken does here is leave anyone who has made a comment, even if only one. If they have registered and not made a comment after a year or so, Ken does kind of an annual purge and removes those members ; so we do actually remove some of the accounts here that are not active and have never posted. He announces when he is doing this, so people know why the membership number is suddenly getting lower. It has nothing to do with ad revenue here, because there are no ads and NO revenue. Ken fronts all of the expense of having this forum, unlike most other forums. Unless a person uses the “help pay the bills” box at the bottom of the page to contribute, this whole forum is completely funded and managed by Ken, with a little admin help from John and myself. Ken is an awesome guy, and the best admin that any forum could ever have !
@Yvonne Smith Thank you for explaining. I like it here, so haven't even looked at how it works. It's been awhile since I was on Reddit, but I think you can delete your account and your stuff stays there forever. I obviously don't know all of the ins and outs, but I think if you want to delete an account, you should be able, or, as you wrote, just log off, and after a period of time, your account is deleted. I never even realized this was a thing, not being able to delete an account, until I had an issue with a health forum I was on. I won't go into it. The whole issue "circles back" to my recent thread on the good and bad about the internet. As for "that other place," I don't believe they have 6000 active members and I think the numbers keep growing there because they have those numbers.
I’ve never known any forum that deleted accounts and it was very rare for anyone to ask on the website where I worked. When they did ask the answer was no. Headless posts look really bad when people read old threads. This forum is well run and the members seem to make an effort to get along and keep things peaceful. Thanks for the info about how it’s run, Yvonne. It’s good to know that. It can be very expensive to run a large website.
Sounds like what churches do. "Members" and "Attendees" are often miles apart. To echo Yvonne's comment, I'm impressed that Ken cleans the member database of any legacy inactive accounts. Here is the thread where Ken walks us through the process as he does the purge each year, updating us on progress with specific numbers. As you said, not purging can be a way to pump up numbers for the investors/advertisers. But it can be a time consuming task that only serves to diminish value if the site is monetized, so why invest time for a net-negative? There is always some number of folks who sign up on a forum but never post a single comment. I've done that in a few Technical Advice forums because with some of them, Visitors cannot see pics or use the Search feature. I signed up with a plumbing forum in 2015 solely to ask advice when I was installing a water softener. I still get the occasional "We miss you" emails. I guess they track Last Post Date through an automated Reminder Email process, and they never purge their rolls.
Hmmmm, a simple google search shows this is a concern of a lot of people, in fact, the EU has a law, and, again, I am not talking about this site. If you want to make it about this site, start your own thread.
NOPE! I didn’t think it was. I’m glad you brought it up. It’s good to talk about how things are run, IMO. I didn’t intend any harm by my comments and I hope you have a good day, Jan.
You know, you started a thread about the way forums are managed, and after 3 comments you bite peoples heads off that they can't talk about the very forum your thread about forums was started on. And you didn't do it in a polite way (not that it makes any sense.) When people stop bothering with threads you start, this is why.
I can be, too. I've learned to take a deep breath before hitting Post Reply, and then I just let it go. It gets easier with practice.
I highly recommend a copy of “How to win friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. If ya haven’t read it, it’s a must and if ya have, it needs to be re-read.