How the heck can we have over 40,000 members

[#1]

Judging by the posts on here where the total on this forum is 494 at present  and topics 120 (claimed 133,789 topics) the numbers are complete rubbish

I assume that the posts/topics include the previous forum(s) and that the member numbers also but I wonder whether with respect to member numbers that there is a measure of double counting (adding members from the old forums and the new ones including the ones who transferred

Surely the number of members in the Community should include only those members who have registered for it and not previous members who have never been anywhere near it

Just to add - this is how I worked it out

Marked all topics as unread - and there were 12 pages at 10 topics per page (corrected for number on last page)

Marked all posts as unread - and there were 50 pages at 10 topics per page (corrected for number on last page)

[#2]

Even if it did count the old forum surely, guessing plusnets customer turnover, a very high percentage are no longer using plusnet  and so obviously never bothered joining the new forum.

[#3]

30 k of them are long time customers of plusnet, who had no choice but to sign upto the forums to try and get some kinda support 

[#4]

When we migrated the old forum to this one there were 30,000 members. Since then we have had a steady 50 and 80 new registrations everyday on average. At the time of posting this, the community has been live for around 175 days. 175 * 60 = 10,500 new users and that is using the lower end of the average new registrations. So its not unrealistic to see this number. Also the fact that the old community was in place for many many years and was restricted, 30,000 members from the old community sounds like a realistic number given the fact that it has been around for a long time.

Remember that not everyone registers to post, some will register in case they want to post in the future, subscribe to threads that interest them (and receive email updates), subscribe to the service status boards or just so they can browse and bookmark other threads. There is a lot a user can do without ever having to post.

[#5]

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@jaread83 wrote:

When we migrated the old forum to this one there were 30,000 members.

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I'd be surprised if half of those were still plusnet customers.

And considering the spammers on this forum remain but just can't post..................................

[#6]

Maybe in the future we could request a cull of users who have not logged in for over 2 years or something like that. Thing about that is that a user might return and find their user has been deleted. There is probably the due process of notifying all of the accounts that have been marked for deletion asking them to log in so they are not marked for deletion but I would need to ask about that.

Just throwing my finger up to the wind, I'd hazard a guess that at least 10,000 users could be deleted.

The benefits of deleting inactive accounts would be that when using the @ mention function, you don't get a myriad of old users when trying to get to the user you want (try mentioning a common name like chris or steve for example).

A disadvantage of this is also that you would see a lot of old threads with 'anonymous' users as the accounts have been deleted and it could end up being a bit of a mess on the old threads.

It's something to think about that's for sure but I need to consider all the things that could potentially go wrong.

[#7]

I don't think we've ever culled forum users, and see little merit in us starting now if I'm honest. Would probably cause more problems than it would solve.

[#8]

I think it's more about curiosity regarding the true number of active members.

[#9]

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@bobpullen wrote:

I don't think we've ever culled forum users, and see little merit in us starting now if I'm honest. Would probably cause more problems than it would solve.

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I can see the practical issues involved in culling forum users and the inevitable impact on threads, but there is a need to review how the historic number of forum users and the current active No. of users is portrayed?  E.g. if you look at the main Community landing page a big bubble advertises that membership is 40,000+ which is a bit 'tongue in cheek'.  A bit of misleading advertising?   In a similar scenario a local amateur theatre group could claim 5000+ members, that being the number who have belonged to the society since its formation in 1929!

Its not really a big issue that needs sorting with any urgency, but it will be a growing burden going forward.

M