XF 1.5 Forum index members count

[Gladius]

So... I've been sending out mailings over the past few days with the automated bounced email handler on. Which is working very well, thanks @Mike .

However, I've noticed that apparently every user whose state gets changed to Email invalid (bounced), gets "deleted" from the forum index stats members count. Making our membership count go down several thousand users simply because so many users have an invalid email.

I'm failing to see the rationale behind this... these are legitimate accounts, many of them have posts. They just happen to have a currently invalid email listed, which happens with an average of 1/3 of accounts older than a few years. So why are they being treated as if they don't exist in the stats count?

 

[Gladius]

Should this be moved to bug reports, @Mike ?

 

[S Thomas]

these are legitimate accounts

Nope, you need a valid email for registration. So if the email is not valid anymore, technically, the account has expired. That's the rationality behind that.
Imagine someone registers with a valid email and the account gets approved. Now he swaps out his email for another one, e.g. a spam email or whatever. This way, he could bypass your email verification with one account - and keep spamming your forum with the same email over and over again.

Just ask your members nicely to check and approve their emails.

 

[Gladius]

You don't need a valid email even for registration, let alone account use. You can have email verification turned off and there'll be no way to know whether the email used to register is valid, nor will it matter. All that's required is that the email is unique in the membership database. Email verification is not mandatory, I've had it turned off for years because it turned out to be a substantial impediment to people completing their registrations for some reason and at the same time not doing anything to deter spammers. Spammers have automated the email verification procedure a decade ago.

So I don't think that that could be the rationale. And you're missing the point -- I can't ask anyone to approve their emails when a) I don't use email verification and b) the flagged users aren't visiting the site any more to get the prompt to update their email and I have no other means of contacting them. The end result is our membership stats going down thousands of users, despite these being legitimate accounts that are now after a number of years being hidden from the stats.

 

[trapped_soul]

Didn't think of this. Good question!

 

[S Thomas]

You don't need a valid email even for registration, let alone account use. You can have email verification turned off and there'll be no way to know whether the email used to register is valid, nor will it matter. All that's required is that the email is unique in the membership database. Email verification is not mandatory, I've had it turned off for years because it turned out to be a substantial impediment to people completing their registrations for some reason and at the same time not doing anything to deter spammers. Spammers have automated the email verification procedure a decade ago.

You do. Unless you have turned off spam filters entirely, which, let's be honest, would be a very unique situation.
There is not only one, but multiple layers of email verification:

1. The obvious one, probably the one you have disabled, being the verification via link in an email.
2. The default check against spam filters.
3. The check against your custom email blacklists.
4. Custom syntax check.

And then there are additional external providers which you can add.
That being said, you do need a valid email to register an account if you have turned on spam filters (default) or any of the other options.
Valid means a non-blocked email and not a RFC whatever syntactical correct email.
If you have none of them active, which, as I stated, would be a very niche case, you might have a point. But that's specific to you.

So I don't think that that could be the rationale. And you're missing the point -- I can't ask anyone to approve their emails when a) I don't use email verification and b) the flagged users aren't visiting the site any more to get the prompt to update their email and I have no other means of contacting them. The end result is our membership stats going down thousands of users, despite these being legitimate accounts that are now after a number of years being hidden from the stats.

They are dead accounts and not legit users if they are not visiting your site and/or don't change their mail. They wouldn't get any notifications anyways when your emails bounce.
So if you artificially want to pump up your user counter, you can do that probably fairly easy with minor modifications. But, by no means, are you losing any user, the count is accurately representing it's intended value - valid user accounts.

 

[Gladius]

You do. Unless you have turned off spam filters entirely, which, let's be honest, would be a very unique situation.
There is not only one, but multiple layers of email verification:

1. The obvious one, probably the one you have disabled, being the verification via link in an email.
2. The default check against spam filters.
3. The check against your custom email blacklists.
4. Custom syntax check.

And then there are additional external providers which you can add.
That being said, you do need a valid email to register an account if you have turned on spam filters (default) or any of the other options.
Valid means a non-blocked email and not a RFC whatever syntactical correct email.
If you have none of them active, which, as I stated, would be a very niche case, you might have a point. But that's specific to you.

All of your points 2-4 amount to exactly... nothing in terms of requiring a valid email short of the syntax check, which in no way, shape or form means that anything that passes a syntax check is also an actual email account, let alone a valid one. Spam checks are done against a database of reported spammer email accounts, which means nothing as far as registration goes. Anything entered randomly that happens to match the proper pattern (e.g. 83x03kmgskt034tge@di8wht89q2cllop.com) will happily pass for a "valid" email at registration time as long as it doesn't happen to be blacklisted somewhere already. And even in that case it will not be rejected outright by default in most instances.

They are dead accounts and not legit users if they are not visiting your site and/or don't change their mail. They wouldn't get any notifications anyways when your emails bounce.
So if you artificially want to pump up your user counter, you can do that probably fairly easy with minor modifications. But, by no means, are you losing any user, the count is accurately representing it's intended value - valid user accounts.

Uh, no. If you're happy to label any account where a user has changed emails and forgot to update it on your forum "dead/deleted", all the power to you. I don't think that most forum admins would be so keen to delete a good chunk of their member base from their stats simply because the users in question didn't update their email, though. I'd venture to say that that would really be the minority. Frankly, your argumentation is really not making much sense. This has nothing to do with "artificially wanting to pump up my user counter". My user counter showed all these accounts in the stats for years just fine -- up to the point a few days ago when I happened to send out a mailing with the automated bounced email handler enabled. The handler then started reducing the members count displayed on the forum index, which is going against what I would consider expected behaviour.

By your logic, XF should arbitrarily delete members from the members count simply due to inactivity for an X amount of time. Which is really equally absurd.

 

[S Thomas]

Well, I was actually going to answer in-depth, but since you're just out for arguing for the sake of arguing, I will keep it short: The automated bounce handler is working as designed, it even tells you explicitely what it will do. Member counts only work for registered plus non-moderated users (waiting for email approval = moderated). It does not matter if they were able to participate at one stage in the entire history of your forum, counters are a live representation of the current state.
You can change that behaviour yourself, e.g. changing the email approval group or changing in code or adjusting widgets etc.

By your logic, XF should arbitrarily delete members from the members count simply due to inactivity for an X amount of time. Which is really equally absurd.

No, that's not my logic, this is your intentional misinterpretation. We were explicitly talking about users with invalid and/or bounced emails. They are dead accounts and not legit users.

/unwatched

 

[Gladius]

That's funny, because to me it seems like you're the one arguing for the sake of arguing and trying to get the last post in with the melodramatic "/unwatched". Either participate or don't, I don't care either way, but posting and then declaring how you're unwatching the thread is really childish.

Pray tell where the automated bounce handler according to you "tells you explicitly" that it will delete users from the member count. I did not know that, nor could I have guessed, because to me it's illogical.

Regarding "counters are a live representation of the current state" -- that's a bit of a stretch to assume since the word "Members:" in the stats implies nothing of the kind. It doesn't say Active Members, Confirmed Members or Members with Current Email Listed. If it did by default, that would be another matter. But it doesn't.

It's reasonable to me to not list moderated users who haven't posted yet due to being in the approval queue (if enabled). It does not feel reasonable to me to delist users who have posted in the past and those who haven't simply because we've recently detected that their email on record is not working, especially if we don't really require a working email to begin with. There are not so subtle nuances here that do matter.

This fact bears spelling out and emphasizing: a working email is in no way necessarily a requirement for using XenForo. We all like it when users have a working email, but the fact is that until I ran the automated bounce handler, thousands of accounts had non-working emails listed and nobody knew, cared or prevented the users from participating in the discussions due to it.

No, that's not my logic, this is your intentional misinterpretation. We were explicitly talking about users with invalid and/or bounced emails. They are dead accounts and not legit users.

That is exactly your logic, to wit: "They are dead accounts and not legit users if they are not visiting your site and/or don't change their mail."

None of the other inactive users are visiting my site or changing their emails either. How are they any different then? Now, either you have an internal logic that works the same for all the users of a given type, or you have a "logic" that only works for some and not for others because it's inconsistent.

Again, you're free to label your users who don't currently have a working email listed as "dead" and "not legit". I don't happen to agree with that notion and it's not sensible on any forum with registration email verification turned off. If they're considered legit accounts for the purpose of showing in the stats at the time of registration and up to the point when/if the automated bounce handler is run, the same standard should apply later on as well regardless of the fact that their state was changed to "email bounced".