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Thank you, Cat. You said it perfectly.
I admit I do feel the forum isn’t as closeknit anymore as it used to be, but then again, it’s growing in popularity and has more and more active posters. I’ve had the privilege of meeting many Windstoners in person, and I love all of you, and I keep in touch with plenty more who I haven’t had the luck to meet yet. I owe a lot of experiences and memories and wonderful friends to this forum.
So to return to my original idea, which I guess I didn’t formulate very well, by cleaning up unused accounts I wasn’t meaning to exclude or offend anyone. I’m not saying people should have to pass a sort of test to become part of our great community. But if the name has been in the list for a year or three and has no posts I don’t see why it can’t be swept out.
Of course, the names to be deleted could be presented to the community first, just to make sure they’re unknown by all and really not participating anywhere, even by PM. :shrug:
Just an idea.I have only met one forum member in person, and it was a wonderful experience!
And, as Cat said, the forums can contain debates, but most of us, if we do feel we have stepped out of line at some time will apologize to whomever we feel we have hurt. And, sometimes, we figure out before we post that it is not something we should post most likely. 😉Welcome Raven, and I hope you grow into the forums! 😀 (Don’t let me scare ya, I have nails, and teeth, but I am really just a big pile of mushy goo, and for the most part would try my best to help anyone here.)
As for the herd, I have belonged to other forums who also believe in the warning system. Usually you gt the email with an allotted time frame to answer back in to keep from being deleted if you haven’t logged in for 6 months to a year. Those I didn’t visit anymore, I just didn’t bother to log onto. Otherwise, I log in periodically to keep my accounts going. I’m not going to say it is fair or not. But, some people we KNOW are never coming back because they left on rocky terms. 😕
Greater Basilisk wrote:Of course, the names to be deleted could be presented to the community first, just to make sure they’re unknown by all and really not participating anywhere, even by PM. :shrug:
Just an idea.I’d be hesitant to point people out by name to the community, I really think if there are going to be any cuts, any communication needs to be handled internaly by a moderator via private e-mail communication. Maybe if it was a once or twice thing, like hey, anyone know what happend to so and so, like I made a thread becuase I was curious as to where some people dissapeared to, but picking them out like “Have you seen XXXX? No? Ok, they’re deleted.” seems a little…I dunno…public humiliation comes to mind, and I don’t think people should be forced to post in public (not that you suggested this, but some may feel *obligated* to speak up should they be called out by name) if they don’t want to. Anyway, just my thoughts, I could be wrong! =P
P.S. Love you too GB!
That’s a point, Cat. But I was more thinking along the lines of “Following users have no posts, registered since 2007, will be deleted.” (I’m just taking what I know works from the other motorcycle forum that gave me this idea.) I mean, there’s a FireMare who registered way in the beginning but never posted; that sort could be cleaned out, maybe.
But people like Scorpiolady, who was fairly active for a while, haven’t seen her since a traveller PYO was sent to her and supposed to be passed on… Those would be iffy to delete and just left alone.
I’m really only talking about accounts that are created but never post. Koishii mentioned doing business with someone who never posted; that’s why I thought for people who never post and most of us wouldn’t know, the person in charge could make a list, name the usernames and ask if anyone’s still dealing with them before the accounts are deleted. Keep in mind this would be for names that registered over a year ago and never said anything.
But I realize that if John or Melody were to supervise that, it’d be giving them yet another job in their too-short days, so maybe it’s not such a good idea. 😳On other forum I have been on if my account laid dormant for x amount of time, they were all different, some as little as 30 days, some as long as 3 months, I was sent an e-mail inviting me back, and if I did not respond then my account could be deleted.
I’ve always had the disabled account. Where you can’t just access the account, but you can email an admin to get it reactivated.
Im all for thinning out the members page. I also agree that it should be by the lack of log in and not the lack of posts since there is nothing wrong with lurking… though I did stop posting in the greetings because of the lack of responses. Im also not suggesting months of inactivity since months is really not that long… years, though? I would treat it like anything in my house… if you dont use it for a year, then you dont need it and it can be thrown out…. or given to goodwill. 8) If someone has not logged in in a year, they will not really miss their account.
I think if this was my forum, I’d be looking at between 700 and 800 members and thinking “That’s not too bad, but it would be nice to have more.” I don’t think I’d be wanting to delete accounts until the number of people got to be astronomical. As in numerous enough to be bogging down the server.
At 800 people, we still only have about a page of members for each letter of the alphabet. That’s almost nothing. One site I sometimes visit has a member list that, when searched alphabetically, returns thousands of pages for each letter. Yes, this is frustrating if i don’t remember someone’s handle and want to contact them, but maybe I needed to keep my own list of people I have contacted, or remember which topics they’ve posted in, so I can find them some other way than looking through the membership list.
But it’s certainly nice that we do have access to that list, instead of only being able to check a member profile via a message they have posted. On many sites it’s next to impossible to find out how many people are members, and who those people are.
There are going to be a lot of lurkers, and a lot of those lurkers won’t visit often or won’t bother to log in when they do. But they can still be contacted by other members, and can still contact others, using PM. We have no idea what is going on there. I know I’d be upset if I needed to get in contact with someone I’d had dealings with from the forum, who I’d only ever communicated with through the forum, only to find they’d been dropped for inactivity after a couple of years and I now had no way to contact them. I mean, even my family and best friends don’t expect to hear from me EVERY year.
Then on the other subject, of being welcomed: some folks love to be welcoming and others love to be welcomed. It’s a joy to watch the happiness. But I have to admit that when I find a new site what I want to do is come in, look around, and get a feel for the place without being committed. This means I’d definitely rather not be seen until I am ready to be seen.
Having someone notice me even though I’ve not posted anything yet, and start a topic specifically to let everyone know I was there, is about on the level of being in a restaurant as a kid and having the waitstaff somehow find out it’s my birthday. For some of us, that’s even worse than being hugged by a clown.
But it’s the way things are done here so, really, no-one should be offended by being on the receiving end of a welcoming committee. However, conversely, no-one on the welcoming committee should be offended by a lack of response from the new member who is perhaps either ignorant of, or mortified by, that welcome.
(I often send people out here for the specific purpose of checking out the flea market as an alternative to eBay as a place to sell a sculpture I am not wanting to buy from them. Obviously they’ll have to open an account in order to post; equally obviously most are not going to have the slightest interest in joining the community. We are all here for our own reasons.)
Always something else…
If we cull the herd, as it were, that opens up the possibility of someone happening to pick a username that is familiar to us all through the use of that same name by a former, and different, member. Perhaps a former member who has a “history” or a former member who after an absence wants to rejoin the flock. I mean rejoin the herd. But who now has to go by a different name because their own name has been appropriated by someone else.
Not culling the list means that existing names will not be usable by anyone other than the original member who signed up with that name.
And…
If we remove a member, wouldn’t that mean any posts they’d made would disappear?
The Castle [Dave wrote:“]Always something else…
If we cull the herd, as it were, that opens up the possibility of someone happening to pick a username that is familiar to us all through the use of that same name by a former, and different, member. Perhaps a former member who has a “history” or a former member who after an absence wants to rejoin the flock. I mean rejoin the herd. But who now has to go by a different name because their own name has been appropriated by someone else.
Not culling the list means that existing names will not be usable by anyone other than the original member who signed up with that name.
And…
If we remove a member, wouldn’t that mean any posts they’d made would disappear?
In response to that, the only people we are talking of ‘culling’ are those who have never posted. Which means we don’t know them as they don’t have a ‘history’ on this forum, and have never been active to begin with.
Although, if we set up some sort of automated e-mail that warned accounts which were inactive/never logged in for too long, and deleted those who didn’t reply…then we’d run into the issues you bring up. I’d hate for someome who was active years ago, then inactive for years for whatever reason, to not be able to return under their old username.
pegasi1978 wrote:WindstoneCollector wrote:And, I honestly haven’t spent too much time on ebay lately, but has there been alot of reselling of the raffle prizes? 😮
I only know of one raffle piece being rehomed and that was Buckeye. The “rehoming” was done here on the forum.
And it was never sold, either. I gave him away (except for shipping costs). So that really doesn’t count as reselling…
@Dave: I think it’s rather silly to want to keep around dead accounts just so we can say we’ve got so and so many members. Several accounts are doubles due to login glitches, so you’re even counting members twice that way.
Also, if you had dealings with someone exclusively over the forum, they haven’t shown up for years and you want to contact them again, what makes you think they’ll come back in a timely manner to read a PM?
Again, kindly keep in mind that the idea has been narrowed down to cleaning up accounts that were created but never used and have lain dormant for years.Dragon87 wrote:pegasi1978 wrote:WindstoneCollector wrote:And, I honestly haven’t spent too much time on ebay lately, but has there been alot of reselling of the raffle prizes? 😮
I only know of one raffle piece being rehomed and that was Buckeye. The “rehoming” was done here on the forum.
And it was never sold, either. I gave him away (except for shipping costs). So that really doesn’t count as reselling…
Thus why I said “rehomed” and not resold. 8)
The Castle [Dave wrote:“]If we remove a member, wouldn’t that mean any posts they’d made would disappear?
Actually, no the posts wouldn’t. While tatt2dcowgrl is no longer in the member list (though she still has a profile), you can still read all of her posts on the forum by searching out “tatt2d” in threads and finding a post of hers to go off of.
If a person PMs then they have logged in and their account would be current. I also dont see the point of keeping profiles around just so we have so many profiles. Who cares if we have 800 members if they are not real members? Reminds me of all these dang Twitter people who want to follow me just so they are following 800 people. Its annoying. :nea: I dont even know them.
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