To prune or not to prune

I've seen/read so many different policies in regards to the handling of inactive members. What is yours? Do you prune any members? If so, under what conditions do they get pruned/deleted?

 

Having digestion problems?


Only prune unvalidated members after 30-90 days.

 

We do not prune or delete any member accounts, I honestly dont see the point in doing so other than maybe the unvalidated members.

 

I don't see the point in pruning the account of someone who's contributed even a single (non-spam) post. After all, the value of content doesn't decrease with inactivity.

Spam bots aside, there are several conditions I have for account deletion.

1. Since the date of registration, that person has not submitted a single (non-spam) post.

2. Since the date of registration, that person hasn't visited since logging in immediately after registration.

I said "since the date of registration," but I did not give a length of time for comparison. The last condition gives that length of time, and ties in with the first two:

3. A single reminder in the form of an email has no effect on the above two points. When I say email, I mean a mass email, which I send about once a year for significant updates to the forum. If the person who ends up remaining inactive signed up near the time of the mass email, I wait for the time I send the next mass email.

 

usually if a member joins then never logs in, they will be deleted in a few months

 

I prune. I have a tracker and every time a user announces to it, they get looked up in the user table (and update it later in the process). I figure it's better to lookup from 80K records than over 300K. Typically, a user does one 'announce' every 40 minutes, and with over 10K peers on the tracker, that's can add up especially with the regular forum activity going on also. But, if I didn't have a tracker, who knows if I would prune the users.

 

6 months ago I pruned 7,000 members for being inactive. 0 posters get pruned that is always a certainty. I see no reason to keep 0 posters on a site and I always give advance warning that the scissors are coming out.

I also prune users who are still showing awaiting e-mail activation. I normally delete them after 24 hours if they are showing up in their own special markup.