Club Arnage

Ain't got a lot to do this evening so I thought I'd browse other areas of the CA forum.

From recent recollection, I recognise about 25-40 users by their name or their 'avatar'.  These are obviously the regulars.

But in my browsing, we have about 1980 members listed! some have only posted one message going back to '03 and beyond.

I would presume that either 'it ain't their scene' or they've forgotten their login. So how many may have 're-joined' under another name I wonder.

At most clubs, that is including net based, lack of use would automatically exclude you after 12 months or so.

I know we want to retain members but there may be something lacking and thats why the 'irregular' users are not contributing.

Anyone got any thoughts on this?

Jerry

Bit of a hobby horse this subject for me.

There are a total of 2463 currently registered users - click the [More Stats] at the bottom of the main forum index page.  About 300-400 of these are registrations received when we were hit by Spam merchants between Aug and Dec last year - the registration procedure was changed after this to stop them.

There are a few known 'duplicates', cf Felix, Felix's cat and ?? (I have a pretty good idea!).

I advocated a while back that there should be a general cleanup to delete all the names of people that had never posted, and perhaps those that hadn't posted for 24 months (or whatever).  I feel that this would give a truer picture of the membership.  Unfortunately, I was shouted down.

Like most clubs, some members are more active than others, and on CA I reckon that there is about 100 who make postings regularly, and many others less frequently.  I also know of many members and guests who regularly browse, but don't post. 

Until recently, there were other parts to CA, but these were so out of date that they have now been by-passed.  It should be borne in mind that the site owner has not had the resouces to maintain these other parts, but now, with the help of the membership, there are medium to long-term plans for additional features.

Having said all that, many of us feel that we must be doing something right - the 'real' membership is steadily increasing, and a great many of the old 'stalwarts' are still here!!  For me the site offers - and here I quote from the recently published constitution of the committee:

".......that is renowned for friendship, openness, humour, honest information and the absence of advertising and commercial gain, as a home for any individuals who share many and various dreams and interests that make up the Le Mans 24-hour race, and much else that takes their fancy besides. "

I have also made many new friends through CA, and although we may only meet once or twice a year, the forum provides a medium to continue and enhance that friendship. 

Because of this, I would not want the basic format of the site to change in any way, and if others have a looksee and for whatever reason decide thay do not want to stay, then it is their loss, not CA's.

End of soliloquy (and I had to spell-check that word!)

Del

I like it here, the other children are nice and bring beer  ;D

Did we shout you down, Del? - sorry!  My own feeling is that having them listed as members doesn't actually affect the rest of us much so if we delete all of them, we may lose one or two who lurk but don't post and are in fact still interested, although it may not be obvious from the stats.  The recent newsletter was sent out to all registered members, in the hope that it may jog the memories of some who haven't visited for a while and certainly one or two did respond as a result (some with cash!)  It's a babies and bathwater thing - if we delete everybody who hasn't posted for a few months - we could lose some who are in fact genuinely interested.

Maybe the committee should look at e-mailing those with apparently "dormant" accounts, to ask if they would mind being deleted?  Perhaps that would be a better way.  Is the software capable of doing this?

I have spoken to "Angry of Houx" recently and he is not angry anymore so he doesn't mind if his name is deleted from the members list. ;D

I looked into the issue of dormant / low post counts a while ago.

Certainly, some members have a low post count, but may still lurk, either logged on or as a guest on a regular basis.  They just choose not to post.
There is a way to ascertain when an individual  member was last logged on, but not a wildcard search of all members.

Also, some members join solely to post tickets for sale or wanted, but do not take any further active part for the rest of the year.

To make a policy of deleting members, there are a number of issues arising.
Firstly, what, as outlined above, constitutes a dormant or inactive member account and where should the lines be drawn to determine that an account should be deleted?
Secondly, the actual nuts and bolts of carrying out a wholesale selective member deletion are, by the very nature of this forum software, long winded.  It would entail myself and the Smoking Man spending long hours wading through the member database, assessing who to delete and then carrying out the deletions.  I for one have better things to do with my time.

To close, my view is that why should we worry about deleting members anyway?  The member database takes up a small proportion of the physical forum server space.  Total number of members is, after all, a pretty meaningless number.  Surely the more important stats are number of page hits / total posts / total views etc.

Next time I see Felix and his Cat, I'll ask them why they don't post much at the moment.

Sorry to hijack this thread for a moment but I did wonder a couple of weeks ago whether all the posts in the Sell or Swap forum took up a lot of server space. Most of these are associated with tickets for the event itself and rarely is there much activity at other times. If there was a server space issue maybe the majority could be deleted?

Well, I'd hate to be deleted by mistook if such a programme started. It seems that if the number of names isn't a serious space issue that it is OK to leave us just floating along. Could those of us "live" (with an interest in these things) maybe change the colour of our log-in names to highlight our "realness"

I would think that dumping "sell or swaps" after the relevant year is very much OK though and makes much more sense.

(and to be really honest, I'd much rather that Steve maintained his proper function around here of finding and displaying the most eclectic selection imaginable of the SB gallery of esoterica...*) :D


*which reminds me, "girls" is getting seriously neglected again...

From discussions with DD at test w/e, the whole forum, pictures 'n' all,  does not occupy a huge amount of disk space - I recall he said less than 1Gb, which is nothing these days.

Posts a reply just in case...  ;D

Ah ha!   The lurkers will be coming outta the woodwork now.....  ;D

Good lord Mr Bennett - 0.022 messages per day - you are simply not trying!

See....I got shouted down again   :'( :'( :'(

To be honest, I'm not that bothered about it - it's just that........ah what the hell, let it rest!!  I would hate to be the cause of wearing Mr Brown's fingers down to the bone   ;D ;D

What I thought was more important was the second half of my posting above, also in answer to Jerry's query - ie I don't think that we should change the basic format of CA.  If people don't like what they see, that's their problem, not ours.

Del

Del,

After reading all the posts.  If there's server space and noone is worried, leave well alone.

So I concur.

Jerry

It may also get rid of lots of folk who only post to sell their tickets, and not members with any "value".

Who cares if it doesnt save that much space, it will still save some ?

Yes, but I still don't fancy the labourious, time eating job of doing the deleting.

surely, it's not such a huge task, not all at one sitting, but say over the next year, do it in 15 minute bits, soon be done.

I'm still not sure why myself.  If the fundraising committee sends out another newsletter at some point, will details of how to buy say, t-shirts, calendars etc, and we sell just a couple to "sleeping" members then it's worth keeping all of them if there's no down side.  In my marketing days, we paid good money for lists of people who "might" be interested in a product.  CA has a free list at its disposal and we know the people on it have some sort of genuine interest in what we're doing.  Seems pointless getting rid of any part of it if it a) takes time and boring work to dump the addresses and b) costs little or nothing to keep it.

looks like your mixing two sides of the coin here Deb's.  I can understand why some of the membership would like the members list to show a true and accurate figure.  If you need a mailing list, fine have a mailing list, but it doesn't represent the membership status.

one the forums i belong to every now and then a message goes out saying that as you haven't actively participated in the forum, ie log on, your name is being removed.

Yeah, but is it really worth Steve's time?
Deb  (or Debs,if you must, but why Deb's?  - sorry, I'm in mood this morning! Don't take it personally!)

Deb, when i produced the shirts a few years back, i had people's details on a list. I then re-sent the year later to tell them i was re-doing for the next year. Many asked if i could remove their address from my list, they didnt like the marketing approach.

Surely if people want it, and visit the site, they will buy it.

I'll happily delete some posts......