Time to cull the herd?

[Lorax]

We have 8149 members.:rolleyes:
3900 have 0 posts.:(
1700 have 1 post.:(

Like the title says, I think it's time to cull the herd. Not including our brand new members who are more than welcome, of course.

I would also like to see anyone who has not posted for a specific period of time (1 year ?, 18 months ?, 2 years ?) removed from the membership list.

I also think threads should expire after a specific length of time. (1 year ? etc.)

What y'all think?

[plumber]

Lorax,

Ridgid may well need those numbers for marketing purposes

QWould it be possible for the web administrator to send a form letter to all addresses that have not posted in 18 months or so to see if they are still valid. perhaps something like:

"We invite you back to see our new format, stay and share your ideas and questions."

adresses no longer current could be deleted. Those who do not reply after the second invite could be considered inactive members.

[Polar Sparky 1224]

Juts like e-mail acounts if you don't use it you should lose it. If they don't post anything maybe they just look at others q&a and then have nothing to add. If a person hasn't logged in for 2 months then remove them.

[CWSmith]

I agree on "culllng" the herd, but an Email would probably be proper, if it isn't a major challenge.

Regarding clearing the forum of older posts, my personal choice would be to move anything beyond two years into a searchable archive. Even then, how long does anyone want to keep things in an archive? Maybe another year or two, but I can't imagine there being much value to anything beyond four years old.

Just my opinion,

CWS

[papadan]

I would rather see them shuffle the forum posts and put them where they belong. Move all the tool discussions out of woodworking and into the tool section. Put all the 3650 threads together instead of every other thread in every forum. LOL

[Bob D.]

I believe that vBulletin has the capability of sending an email out to all or a select group of users. Maybe the list could be filtered to everyone who has not recorded any activity in the past 6 months. Send that group an email asking if they are still interested, if yes then they do something to stay a part of the group (log into the forum). If they do not do so within 14 days (or some other reasonable time) then they will automatically be deactivated and removed from the system.

Now should they want to come back later will vBulletin allow them to use the same UserID I would think not but maybe it would (put a user on ice so to speak and re-activate them later) if they contacted the forum Admin but this sounds to me like a headache for Josh or whoever is sitting in his seat at the time.

[BadgerDave]

If culling will serve a useful purpose, and I doubt it will, then fine hack away. If, on the other hand, its done just to reduce the number of members listed as registered for the BB whats the point? I wasn't aware of a rule that madates one must post in order to maintain membership here. Where's the harm in lurking?

[wbrooks]

I really like the fact that post that I spent a long time typing out and or drawing are still around. One other forum I belong to cycles the post to the scrap bin in less than a year. Most times when someone takes the time to provide detailed instructions or solutions the info is asked for time and again, so it is much easier to flip a link to the old post than retype it all. Maybe if Josh gets bored one month he can go through the old posts and kill the ones with out of date info or useless info but I bet that would take forever to do it right

[L Turner]

I don't Always post. In fact I visited the forum for a long long time before I ever joined it. I don't always take the time to post but I like browsing to see what is new in shops everywhere or what different people are doing. I get some great info and ideas.

[Lorax]

WB and BD

You both make excellent points and I agree. I just thought that members should contribute to the Forum in some way, after all you don't need to be a member to lurk.

Papadan

Excellent idea to put the posts in the proper Forums.
It would make searches a lot easier.

[Josh]

Once we are confident that we have the forum running the way we want I am going to send a reinvite out to all the members. Some people signed up when the forum had 50 posts total. Not much to do. i think if we reinvite everyone back that we may be able to get some old memembers involved again.

Is there a problem with having registered memembers that are inactive?

And yes it looks good for marketing purposes to have a larger number in our userbase. The real number we care about is the 1000+ visitors a day that come to the board (registered and unregistered) We are picking up new users at an accelerated pace now because of some changes I have made on ridgid.com.

Josh

[Bob D.]

I agree that there is value in retaining the old posts, I do not want to see the time invested by members in offering their insight and lessons learned dumped to the bit bucket (deleted or otherwise removed). My comment about removing members as active did not make any suggestion that to remain a member one would have to make regular postings, only that they 'check-in' at some to-be-determined frequency, I suggested one year I think w/o going back to review my earlier comments.

Some members who do not appear to visit the forum any longer have given us very useful information, such a Bob Smalser's series on refurbishing old planes and chisels which apparently is now gone. I just searched for any of his posts and nothing found, although he is still isted as a member and his profile says he made 28 posts.

I did find most of his posts here on another site, so the information is not totally lost;

http://www.cianperez.com/Wood/Wood_home.htm

[Josh]

Until we have a real problem with there being to many posts on the boards I would rather just leave the complete history alone. I need to rebuild the search indexes. thats why some of the old posts dont search well. Just havent had the time to let eh process run for 2 hrs ;-) I will put it on my list of things to do. If I get a chance I will try and move some of the posts.

Josh

[Bob D.]

Thanks Josh. You doing a good job of "minding the store" so to speak I think with maintenance of the forum and answerng our questions .

[HVAC HAWK]

i think when some one registers that they should have the state they live in . i just think its nice to know.:) :D

[thermokitty]

14 days or 90 days are not reasonable timelines to respond to a membership query if the individual is currently taking their turn defending your freedoms, until they return from deployment.

[Polar Sparky 1224]

On the other hand it is nice to just look around at the topics and add something, if you feel so inclined. I have had a few days in the past when i just looked and didn't see anything that caught my attention.
So I take back what I had said earlier. Let em stay if atleast they get something out of reading the messages here.

[michael stephen]

i wonder how many active members are there?

[Bob D.]

That's pretty much at the root of the discussion, and to determine that we would have to define what 'active' is.

A member who has never originated a thread or made a post to a thread may still visit the site and read every day. Does that make them inactive, I think not.

Someone else may only drop in every 3 or 4 months, but may offer very useful information to the group. In between their infrequent visits, are they inactive?

I think Josh's decision to just let it be until such time that there is some performance hit on the system, IF that should occur and that is not known at this time. vBulletin certainly supports groups larger than ours is at present so shouldn't be a problem until we get everyone who has ever swung a hammer enrolled :)