Not a complaint, honest, but searching for a member here is an exercise in futility. I'd guess there are around a hundred active members at any given time, and by my count there are currently over 63,000 'registered members'. Surely there are plugins available allowing admins to purge members based on lack of participation?
I won't venture to speak for our illustrious bear, but if you try to find somebody, for instance to send a PM or something, it isn't easy. There doesn't seem to be any field for searching by a member's name, unless you put a common word in the actual search field and then put their name in the "posted by" or whatever it's called. I just tried that and it seems to work, assuming they've actually used the common word you're searching for.
I guess I should have said 'find a member'. I've had occasions where I remembered part of a members screen name, and had to try to find him or her by scrolling through all 3162 pages of names. Just seems like it's pretty unlikely someone who registered in 2014 and hasn't returned since will be back.
If you try it the way I said, using the regular search function, if you remember the first few letters of the name the site will auto-fill the rest. I don't know if it works any other way (for instance if you remember the last few letters or a few in the middle. EDIT—nope. Tried it. Doesn't work. You need to know the first three letters or so.
I've never been able to find anything with the search on this site. You can put in the exact title of a thread and not find that thread or anything close to it. Members are the same.
So, I have no skin in the game defending the forum software, which is generally acknowledged to be in need of an upgrade, however... a quick search for this thread title produces and a member search for "ea" produces (sorry for the quality - can't screen-shot a drop-down so photographed it...) I don't think it is that bad for nearly two million posts and 60+ thousand members?
Thanks. I guess my actual question was, 'what's the advantage to cluttering up the database with all the information about 60,000 members who aren't here anymore and won't be back'? There must be a reason. Enquiring minds want to know.
60,000 isn't much in database terms -- what really clogs the database arteries is images -- and keeping the members accounts "open" is part of historical record. The thing with a writing forum is that comments made ten years ago are often just as relevant as comments made yesterday which is why we don't generally lose sleep over "zombie" threads if the discussion is still meaningful. We may mention it if a new user is inadvertently directly addressing a member who hasn't been seen for over a decade, but some members disappear then re-appear many years later. It's their choice, not ours.
Depending on how the database is structured, an active/inactive flag might not be difficult to do. With a utility program that changes the flag if no posts have been made in the last xx days.
We humble mods don't have access to anything like that -- and for good reason -- so I wouldn't know. Out of interest, what do you think would be the benefit of an active/inactive flag? We should be responding to content not poster, and if you're curious, you can see when a member was last here simply by clicking their user-name. You can see when a post was made just by looking at it. If it was ten years ago and the poster only has single figures of posts to their name, it's a pretty safe bet that they're not that active, however their input is as valuable as anyone else's, and if they turn up after a decade to make a point (and they do!), then so what?
That was in response to the OP, about searching members. A search like that could be limited to only active members.
I'm surprised it found several at the top. That has not been my experience. Just to further the experiment, I searched for "What are you reading now" and narrowed it to titles only. I got one result on the last of five pages, which is one more than I've gotten in similar searches.
its not so much that there's an advantage to keeping the 60k data records as that 1) we don't know which of that 60k are still lurking - i saw dante dases online the other day and he hasn't posted for about 7 years and 2) the content is still viewed by more recent members and we don't want most of the site to show as being by 'deleted member' in terms of searching go to the search at the top right, and you can either search for 'posted by member' or you can click on more and on the advanced search page you can search for threads by a certain member that are newer than xx
Yeah, it makes no sense to delete inactive members — What if they come back? I suppose you can programmatically separate the inactive from active members in a list. You don't even need a flag. You just need an algorithm and a table in the database defining them (yes, it's called a table). You can then filter the inactive members from the search query. At least in theory. I doubt anyone would bother making such a WF plugin. I'm not sure there's much of a gain.
we actually do have a usergroup for inactive members, its where we put people who request to leave after anonymising their usernames because content isn't deleted, people can also request to be put in itn if they want a forum break to study for an exam or something. but its not heavily used
The tag's not visible to non admins, its not desirable to advertise inactivity to hackers and spammers and other stuff that lives under stones
Generally, you never delete records out of a database whereever possible. It screws up data integrity.
This is also a good point - while we are running on XF1 the whole thing is less stable than a celebrity marriage so i wouldn't want to do anything radical to it in case it fell over
