Kill 90% of WP "members"

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Yeah I got that too. If you're talking about posting pictures, the solution is to post 3 or fewer images per post. I don't know why. I'm probably missing something.

Interesting...so people who lurk, reading the forums, and then sign up finally, but have nothing to say yet, we should get rid of them? That's rediculous.

Does having more accounts actually affect the efficiency of the server?

My wild guess is that it doesn't.

What is smilies data? Sorry, but I keep looking at the emoticons thinking that has something to do with it.

Yes it is that, I think. It's been a bit dodgy of late, failing to load.

Thanks, I haven't had that problem, but rarely use them. My guess too is that the number of members wouldn't impact the efficiency of the server unless they really were using the server at the same time. I'm thinking it's just a little extra space on the hard drive. But I might be looking at in the wrong way.

I think the advertisers might like it too. And, I like numbers, so I keep track of it as it goes up, along with how many people are viewing the site. And just for clarification, the members online do include people that aren't members, don't they?

I would imagine the number of members to be a much lower number, because there are usually only a handful at the top of each forum listed.

Finally, the large number of members might motivate new people to join; thinking must be a good Discussion board with 49,141 members.

Notice how many of the 0 post accounts are spam accounts (the ones with the websites redirecting to Viagra, homeopathic medicine, etc.). It would be a good idea to get rid of all those. It might take a long time to clear them up, though, if one is to make sure not to delete the accounts that were created by people who genuinely wish to use this site.

That's interesting, never noticed, it but I only used the search accounts feature one time out of curiosity. So these people are setting up an account, in hopes that someone will see their website doing a search for accounts and click on it, from my understanding of your report, or looked at the rules and decided it wasn't worth the trouble, and went away.

It seems like it would be quite a bit of trouble to email each account and wait for responses. I'm not sure if the benefit would outweigh the cost. The cost seems to be someone clicking on the website, and getting bamboozled into something they don't need. But I'm not sure how many members would actually search accounts and pay much attention to the websites on accounts that aren't used. Are there other problems with these accounts, I'm not seeing?

I guess there is a potential of a problem if they come back to use the site with the advertisements, but it wouldn't stop them from establishing a new account unless they were banned.

So could it be possible that many of those accounts that appear to be spammers with zero posts are members with banned accounts, if they have been caught spamming members by PM? If that is the case, I don't see any harm or much problems in deleting them, but if they are banned, I'm not sure what real harm it does for the account to stay on the server.

But, I do see the potential for the existing spam type accounts that haven't been used yet to be used in the future to bother people. I guess it would be a matter of someone going to the time and effort to contact them and get a reply vs. how valuable the member count is seen by the owner of this website.

The only problem these empty accounts really create is an inflated member count. It would be nice to know how many actual members WP has.

Oh, no! I'm going to die!

I agree with this.

It's all my fault.

And how many lurkers there are, which is harder.

It might be useful to see a graph of number-of-members-online against time.

I can understand your interest in that. I found the statistics the original poster provided very interesting. And wondered about itself when I checked out the account list. If WP were to decide to do this, Vigilans idea seems fair enough to me to the existing members.

There does seem like there would be quite a bit of time and effort to keep track of it, and since the operation is small and comprised mostly of volunteers, I don't see the benefit as necessarily more significant than the effort required to get the benefit, but that's just my opinion. Maybe the software could do it automatically?

It might be interesting to start a discussion to determine how many members actually use the site. Someone might be interested enough in taking the time and effort to provide an approximation from the account information. The information already provided in this topic give us a ballpark idea.