New year cleanup? Confirmed...completed

[IBBoard]

Something that occasionally bothers my "tidy webmaster" sensibilities is the large number of 'dead' members we have. I'd guesstimate that about 90% of our members haven't even visited in the past six months, never mind posted.

Well, maybe 80% in the past six months and 90% (due to new signups) in the past month.

Either way, it seems like far too many members to still have floating round when I've made the odd announcement by email (like our fourth birthday).

I don't know how many responses I'll get, but would it be unreasonable to archive all posts over a year old and delete all members who haven't visited in the past two months once it gets to the new year? It'd certainly be a good way to clean the place up and get some of the numbers a bit more realistic

Even better would be if I could archive the old posts to simple HTML files....maybe that's too much when I've got other things planned as well


[edit] Cleanup completed (although archiving needs some more work)

[MadMaffMan]

Sounds like a good idea to me. Nowt wrong with a little spring cleaning, even if it is Xmas.
What are the plans you mention?

[IBBoard]

Various upgrades to the downloads section (searching, changing categories to be "/Downloads/cat_BadgesAndBanners.html", etc), updates to the Texture Tool, IChunkyViewer, SGA Explorer and the rest of them, updates to the modules that my Fiancee uses on her CMS, a bit of skinning at some point (maybe)...the list goes on for what I'd like to do

Oh, and there's the ever present "make Hive World Terra a bigger and more well known site" idea. I always promise myself I'm going to do something, sometimes make a minor push, get a brief increase in traffic and then run out of time again :\

[IBBoard]

I've just identified all of the people, and it's 90 of our 122 members who haven't visited in the past two months! That'll cut our members list down a little Although hopefully people like Hangar-8 and Mel_Danes will come back when I send the email out

[edit] Just sent out the following email to the 90 members who haven't visited recently:

Hi,

With the New Year approaching, the Hive World Terra forum is looking to clear up its database. We currently have well over 100 members registered with only a small handful posting on a regular (or even irregular) basis. Since we still have accounts from the inception of the forum for members who are unlikely to return I decided it was time to clear up the database and remove all members who have not visited the forums in the past two months.

You are receiving this email because you are one of the members who has not visited the Hive World Terra forums (http://forums.hiveworldterra.co.uk, formerly hiveworldterra.ibboard.co.uk) for over two months. If you do not either visit the forums and post a message or reply to this email then your account will be closed as part of the clean-up.

Once the clean-up of members is complete then a large number of posts will also be archived so that the forum stats more accurately represent the current state of the forum.

So, if you haven't visited the forums in a while then why not make a return? For some members there will have been a lot of changes, for others there may just be some new faces and new developments.

Thanks, and hopefully I may see you on the forums again soon,

IBBoard (formerly The Emperor)
Webmaster of Hive World Terra and the HWT Forums

[MadMaffMan]

It would be nice if Hangar-8 (spelt it correct at last ) and Mel Danes come back, Mel helped me with the problem on the BT Rhino....top bloke.

Ooops.....gotta go just seen the kitten has climbed to the top of the Xmas tree.

[IBBoard]

Yeah, Hangar-8's a bit busy with his own forums now, but hopefully he'll return Not seen much of Mel Danes recently, and Sandwichwarrior and Multimadman are in there as well but they've been missing since around the release of WA

As for the kitten, LOL! We've got a cat now, but he's about 1 (we got him from the rescue home) and he occasionally goes crazy batting a low bauble but he's not climbed the tree yet. Chewed it - yes (one time he was even chewing a branch from underneath, I looked in, saw him and he stopped chewing with his teeth still round it and looked as if to say "what? I'm not doing anything!")

And back on an on-topic note, we've lost four people to dead email addresses already.

[IBBoard]

Okay, the cleanup has now begun. I've deleted 83 members in one big swoop! Now to do something about some of the older posts and to tidy up some loose ends in the database (because I don't know of a way to mass-delete people from the Admin Control Panel, so I did it directly!)

[edit] Trailing PMs (which weren't showing up in control panels, but which were counting towards allocations) and trailing user groups have now been deleted.

Now to work out how to tidy up some of the shadow topics from when I moved them and didn't want the poster coming back two days later and going "where's my post gone?"

[edit2] Damnit, I broke some old topics a little :\ anyone who has been deleted now has all of their posts hidden. I'll try to get it sorted soon - they're still in the database, just not visible in topics!

[edit3] Missing posts have now been restored after some manual updates and a bit of digging in backups of the members table (it's a good job I kept it!)

Archiving of posts will occur at some point in the future