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This is a question for Melody and Nambroth in terms of legislation and for everybody in terms of opinion.
I’m wondering if it’s an option to clean out the members list of this forum. I recently sent out a PM to a couple people and was trying to find the username of a friend. Lemme tell you sorting through the two dozens pages of members makes it hard, and I was surprised to see lots and lots and lots of names from one or two or more years ago who never posted a thing but are still in the list.
I think a little slimming wouldn’t hurt. If it were me, I’d also delete members that hadn’t posted in a year. But if we could at least get rid of those who don’t ever participate, I think it would be an improvement.
Yeah, I like cleaning up… 😳I like the idea, and 9 of the 27 pages in the list are people with no comments…but some of them might have signed up just to win raffles. 🙄
“cleaning house” so to speak, is a good idea… ‘tho Roddy says i clean house by employing the law of entropy – it’s easier to create chaos than it is to create order – chaos usually wins at our house 😳 😳 😆 😆
twindragonsmum 😀
tdm
My opinion is we shouldn’t exclude anyone from the forum because they don’t post. If someone doesn’t want to chat it up and prefer to lurk, I’m fine with that. They still get privileges like raffles, PMs, member search, etc.
However, if members haven’t logged in for a couple of years (regardless if they posted or not), then I can understand admin/mods deciding to delete that account. They aren’t taking advantage of the privileges anyways even if they do still visit the forum occasionally.
My 2 cents 🙂
That would make life a bit easier for us – but wouldn’t you have to send some sort of warning email to make sure people keep on that are actually logging on on a regular basis?
As in a – if you don’t log on by such and such a date, at such and such a time, your account will be disabled. And for people that are taking extended vacations (hey it’s happened) then would they be able to re-enable their account on their return?
I think this is more of a John and Snapdragon question (I can never spell his new username).
While I do have some controls here, I don’t think I can really figure out who is active and who is not without manually going through each and every profile to see when last login was etc. Very tedious! If it comes to it and I’m asked though I’ll do it.
Snap might have a better way of doing it- or maybe not. I don’t know what it looks like from the back end of the forum.That said it’s really up to John and Melody if they want to do this or not. You might want to ping them with an email directing them here, as they might miss this thread.
Volunteer mod- I'm here to help! Email me for the best response: nambroth at gmail.com
My art: featherdust.comWhile I think it’s kind of rude to arbatrarly just “delete peoples profiles” if they haven’t used them, I do feel many people have just made acconts to basically just enter raffles and things of that nature. I do believe you can “lurk” without being a member can’t you? Also, if you want to buy from the store that’s also something entirely different and you need to create a seperate account for the forum.
Anyway, I’m all for cleaning house if people don’t want to participate, but still reap all the benefits. Maybe I’m being rude, but it’s also kind of inconsiderate for people to create profiles (sometimes multiple profiles) just to get something for nothing while many of us here log on monthly, weekly, even daily and activly partipate in the forum news, events, and charities we have here.
I’m not saying everoyne who has zero posts is trying to win stuff, but it seems like we hit a spike in new *ghost* memebers ever since raffles started….just saying is all. :shrug:
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Dreamscape, Orion, Poison Dart, Fireberry, Spangler + Tigerberry Dragonsdrag0nfeathers wrote:I do believe you can “lurk” without being a member can’t you? Also, if you want to buy from the store that’s also something entirely different and you need to create a seperate account for the forum.
I lurked for a good month or more before I joined, and the reason I joined was because of those tantalizing PYO’s for sale! 😆 A store account is a separate log-in, and all the posts here are public.
If somebody has no posts in their account, and it was created years ago, there’s a good chance they’ve forgotten either it or the password. If it was created recently, then maybe it was for the raffles.
I could see if they haven’t logged in for like 2 years or more, since all posts are open, but there are some people who are military here and may not be able to post all the time, such as if they are moved to an assignment for a year. Two years past login I could see (I know some websites/forums will remove logins 2 years older or more due to inactivity, but not all. Some people may come back after a year or more though should finances improve (such as if they don’t want to be tempted right now and the personal finances are a little tight, especially since Windstones are collectible. I guess I still consider this a small forum, since there are under 800 members here. I’m on 4 other forums that are substantially larger – one since it’s creation from a small old yahoo group, and another with the largest forum I’m a member of having over 28,000 members (only 10,000 of which are considered active). None of them clean out old names for accounts, but they might clean out old topics. You can search alphabetically for names as well. Just shows the forum has grown with more members. 🙂
drag0nfeathers wrote:While I think it’s kind of rude to arbatrarly just “delete peoples profiles” if they haven’t used them, I do feel many people have just made acconts to basically just enter raffles and things of that nature. I do believe you can “lurk” without being a member can’t you? Also, if you want to buy from the store that’s also something entirely different and you need to create a seperate account for the forum.
Anyway, I’m all for cleaning house if people don’t want to participate, but still reap all the benefits. Maybe I’m being rude, but it’s also kind of inconsiderate for people to create profiles (sometimes multiple profiles) just to get something for nothing while many of us here log on monthly, weekly, even daily and activly partipate in the forum news, events, and charities we have here.
I’m not saying everoyne who has zero posts is trying to win stuff, but it seems like we hit a spike in new *ghost* memebers ever since raffles started….just saying is all. :shrug:
Interesting discussion going on here. I guess I would qualify as a lurker as I seldom post. I do however read the forums almost every day, usually multiple times in a day. As a collector I’m mostly in the flea market forums. I can understand how some long time members feel when they see all the newbies signing up for a chance at the raffles, that is frustrating. I’ve been a member for I believe just over a year in which time I’ve only entered two raffles which were of interest to me. I don’t know how you can distinguish who is a valued forum member just by post count though so it would be awkward to just start deleting people from the forums.
Maybe we could just delete accounts that have not logged in for at least two years. That would be enough to modestly clean house, but not punish lurkers or those away from their computers for a long time. And it may encourage the mysterious raffle fans to log in and post “Ooooh, shiny, I love it!” in an appropriate thread once every year or so.
Thanks for all your thoughts. I’ll add some more of my own:
It’s possible for non-members to read the forums, so you don’t need an account to lurk. Aside from the nuisance of ploughing through nearly thirty pages of names, many of which are “dead accounts,” what bugs me most about the zero posters is the following: Often when a new name joins there’s a warm welcome for him or her, but a lot of those people don’t have the decency to say thanks or introduce themselves. I consider that downright rude. It’s like sending in your calling card and then turning your back when the lady of the house comes forward to greet you.
I agree, this is a small forum. I think it would add to their air of “exclusivity” – and everybody wants to be exclusive somehow – if there were a couple guidelines for active participation. In a small motorcycle forum I moderate, we have a limit on the number of members and if someone has neither posted nor come for a drive in a year or so their account is deleted. Windstone needn’t be that strict, but I think it couldn’t hurt to keep the forum active by asking people who sign up to actually participate, and if they don’t, let them lurk but without an account that allows for “treats” like raffles.I really agree with GB.
When people don’t even say one thing when they get greeted so nicely by the other members here, I understand that frustration too. It just feels rude. You know for sure then (at least most of the time) that said people are only joning to lurk and enter raffles.
I feel like the chances of me ever winning a raffle are small when it comes to the fact that potentially hundreds of lurkers who never post are also entering. 😕 But I feel happy for those long time members, or even newbies who are posting regularly when they are winning.
Just my two cents. 🙂
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