Purge

[SOCAdmin]

Sometime next month, or maybe early in January, to bring in the New Year, there will be a member purge.

No, if you've been participating in discussions here, your account is not going to be removed. If you were part of the last forum, you will be familiar with it, as it will be pretty much the same.

To keep our member numbers a little more realistic, as many people register for forum accounts and then never come back, we will be removing those who created an account six months or longer ago and haven't been back since. Those who have used a first and last name and an avatar might be retained for longer. No one who has posted in the forum will be removed, even by request, because that breaks up the forum thread, registering their posts as "Guest," which would lead to inevitable questions about Guests posting. On occasion, for those who want me to delete their accounts, I have changed their member name; however, that's not a given.

Since it will have been only about a year since we restarted the forum, our first purge won't be very large, but subsequent ones will be.

 

[Ken Anderson]

Again, the purge is nothing you need to worry about if you log into your account from time to time, even if you haven't posted. The goal isn't to get rid of people, but to make it so that the member count more accurately portrays the number of members we actually have.

It is common, on Internet forums, for people to register for accounts and never come back, or perhaps to log in once or twice shortly after creating the account, and then forget about it. These are not active members. The first one won't purge large numbers of members, but subsequent ones will.

 

[Liz Adams]

This makes complete sense to me.
I'm on another site that has tens of thousands of members and as far as I know they do nothing like this.
There are accounts on there going back almost 20 years that are still open but inactive .

The staff on there have all on just trying to keep the spam accounts at bay.

Also, and for me this is the main point , it would stop one person creating multiple accounts . We have them on the other site.
They create all these accounts for "back up" for as and when they inevitably get banned.
They use different IP addresses and email addresses that cannot be changed .

 

[Liz Adams]

That last line should have read "cannot be traced".
( Sorry, don't know how to edit on here yet).

 

[Ken Anderson]

I'm on another site that has tens of thousands of members and as far as I know they do nothing like this.
There are accounts on there going back almost 20 years that are still open but inactive .

Often, that happens because no one wants to take the time to purge their numbers, while some admins will leave the accounts there because the larger numbers make their forum look bigger and better.

 

[Ken Anderson]

( Sorry, don't know how to edit on here yet).

Click the "Edit" button, which is surrounded by "Report" and "Delete".

 

[Liz Adams]

Thank you Ken.
I'm trying to find it. There's a row of symbols across the top .
I'll figure it out eventually !!

 

[Hedi Mitchell]

@Ken Anderson - Think the purge an excellent idea

 

[Yvonne Smith]

Thank you Ken.
I'm trying to find it. There's a row of symbols across the top .
I'll figure it out eventually !!

You do not see the edit button when you are writing a post, you can see it on posts that you already wrote and posted to the forum, and then only for a certain length of time. I think maybe it is 24 hours that you can edit your post. If you look at posts you wrote earlier today, you should see on the bottom left where it says “Edit”.
As long as you can see that at the bottom of a post you can edit the post by clicking on the edit button.

 

[Liz Adams]

You do not see the edit button when you are writing a post, you can see it on posts that you already wrote and posted to the forum, and then only for a certain length of time. I think maybe it is 24 hours that you can edit your post. If you look at posts you wrote earlier today, you should see on the bottom left where it says “Edit”.
As long as you can see that at the bottom of a post you can edit the post by clicking on the edit button.

Ah, I see it now .
It's the three little dots next to "report" and it comes up.
Thank you Yvonne.

 

[Ken Anderson]

Ah, I see it now .
It's the three little dots next to "report" and it comes up.
Thank you Yvonne.

I forgot that not everyone accesses the forum from a big screen. The forum content is presented differently depending on the size of the screen, so it looks different on a tablet or a smartphone. All the same stuff is there but some of it is more hidden.

 

[Liz Adams]

I forgot that not everyone accesses the forum from a big screen. The forum content is presented differently depending on the size of the screen, so it looks different on a tablet or a smartphone. All the same stuff is there but some of it is more hidden.

Thank you Ken,and yes, I'm just on a little phone .