XF 1.3 Pruning inactive members

[gavpeds]

Is there an option to prune members? Also i was thinking of deleting banned accounts but wonder if it is better to keep them. If i delete banned accounts i guess there would be nothing stopping them joining again but if i keep them then they can not access?

 

[Paul B]

The Batch Update Users function may be of some use.

 

[gavpeds]

Thanks, i was looking for something that was a bit more automated. Like it runs a prune every so often on users who have not visited in x amount of time of similar.

 

[Jeff Fuqua]

Was an add-on that does this ever created? I've searched everywhere for a way to prune users who have not logged on in XXX days that automatically runs once a month.

 

[AndyB]

This add-on doesn't run on a cron entry, but makes pruning users really easy.

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/delete-users.4516/

 

[Bill Stuntz]

What happens to the posts that were made by the users who have been pruned? We have MANY significant posts that were made by users who have passed away or become inactive for some other reason.

 

[AndyB]

What happens to the posts that were made by the users who have been pruned?

I think it's better to not prune members that have posts. I suggest only pruning members that have 0 posts and have not logged in for over a year.

 

[Bill Stuntz]

We have about 70K users, and nearly 2K active in the last 30 days. Is there a BIG penalty from having so many inactive users?

 

[AndyB]

We have about 70K users, and nearly 2K active in the last 30 days. Is there a BIG penalty from having so many inactive users?

How many users with 0 posts and inactive over 1 year?

 

[Bill Stuntz]

I don't know for sure. But I doubt that very many users have 0 posts. People can browse our site without joining with few restrictions. I'm guessing that most of them join simply to ask a question, and maybe a couple follow-up posts. But if they had a few posts say, 3 years ago & haven't been back since, their question and the answers still might be useful to more recent (or future) users. We don't want to lose that history. For all practical purposes, we don't delete ANYTHING from our MB. We have 135K threads, >1M posts, and about 250K images.

 

[Robru]

How many users with 0 posts and inactive over 1 year?

 

[AndyB]

I don't know for sure. But I doubt that very many users have 0 posts.

I bet there are many.

 

[Bill Stuntz]

I'm pretty new to this, and (obviously) I'm not the primary admin. And there's WAY too much I don't know. How do I find that information? Can I find out from inside XF? We have threads/posts starting in 2002.

 

[Robru]

I'm pretty new to this, and (obviously) I'm not the primary admin. And there's WAY too much I don't know. How do I find that information? Can I find out from inside XF? We have threads/posts starting in 2002.

It is an add-on, you find it here: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/delete-users.4516/

 

[Bill Stuntz]

I can install add-ons, but I DO NOT have permission to prune users. I'm simply doing research to determine whether we should think about doing so. And I'm a little unclear about using that add-on. If I use it to get that count what happens to VIP deceased users who may have had 1000+ great posts before they passed away 2 years ago? Is that post count their TOTAL post count, or the post count in the last year? They will obviously not have logged in and have 0 posts in the last year. The powers that be would KILL me If I were to accidentally delete them and their history with us. And we have about 15 years of history in our database.

 

[Robru]

The add-on only removes users who have not been online for 365 days and have zero posts.
So if users have existing posts, these users will not be deleted. Even though they have been a member for 10 years.

Set the limit to 1 to try it out.

 

[Bill Stuntz]

I hadn't thought to try a user search for all users with these settings: I had forgotten that I could search by post count, etc in the CP.

I got a MUCH bigger number than I expected - about 45K. When I limited the search to "not Banned" I got about 3K. So if I'm interpreting the results correctly, we have >40K banned users (mostly spammers, I think), about 3K users who have never actually been active users, and >25K users who are now (or have been) active users. Out of about 70K total users.

What are the implications of doing nothing, vs deleting only the banned users vs deleting all 0-post users? We have a FEW users who were banned for reasons other than spam. Would deleting users actually result in increased performance during normal operation? Or would it simply speed up the registration process with fewer accounts to check for duplicate email addresses, and decrease our total user count?

As I said, I'm trying to determine whether I should recommend deleting inactive users to the powers that be. Doing so would probably make our user count a more accurate representation of our actual user base.

 

[Robru]

That is more a question for @AndyB

 

[Bill Stuntz]

Thanks. We already use several of his add-ons, but not that one. We're new to XF, and are still completing the conversion from vB. We had to go live a little before we were ready because of the 10/1 SSL deadline. We're still trying to recover some attachments & posts that didn't import properly. And as I said we're VERY careful to keep ALL the information our MB intact for later researchers, if nothing else. We're an educational MB. And I'd be in trouble if I were to do something that had a side-effect of deleting meaningful information from our forums.