Can you imagine about half the members here didn't post even once?

[tolbs17]

It might be nice to recognize post counts ending with -69. 

Trust me, that would be too much work. 

I've seen some accounts get deleted due to extreme inactivity in other forums.

[hbelkins]

It might be nice to recognize post counts ending with -69. 

Trust me, that would be too much work. 

I've seen some accounts get deleted due to extreme inactivity in other forums.

Yes, one of the Saturn forums I was on bans anyone who doesn't post every so often. That bugs me, as such a policy seems to encourage posts that don't add anything to the discussion.

[JoePCool14]

It might be nice to recognize post counts ending with -69. 

Trust me, that would be too much work. 

I've seen some accounts get deleted due to extreme inactivity in other forums.

Yes, one of the Saturn forums I was on bans anyone who doesn't post every so often. That bugs me, as such a policy seems to encourage posts that don't add anything to the discussion.

That's a stupid policy. I get that it consumes data to store accounts, but it also consumes data to store useless posts to keep accounts open.

[kphoger]

I imagine that the data saved far outweighs the data used.

Don't you suppose most people who join a Saturn forum only join to ask a question about what's wrong with their car, then never post again?  Only a small group of people are actually discussing things on an ongoing basis.

[Scott5114]

I'm not gonna install SMF just to check, but storing a user account probably takes no more than 1—2 kb of data. Not really enough to justify a deletion policy on that reason alone. I could see maybe doing it to allow desirable names (like common first names unadorned with numbers or other identifiers) to be reclaimed.

With the way relational databases work, the way it is stored in the database is that every account that is registered gets a unique ID number (I know that mine on this forum is 33). When you post, the post is stored along with the ID number of the poster (so this post would have "33" somewhere in the database row). Then, when that post is displayed, it looks up the user information for that user (user name, avatar, etc) and loads it into the page in real time. That's why whenever you change your avatar, it changes across the forum–the avatar is only loaded in whenever the forum sees a post with your user number, and it always pulls the currently-selected avatar.

This is also why we are extremely reluctant to delete user accounts, and usually advise people that don't want their account anymore to simply stop using it or to scramble their password. When we delete an account, the thread display script would try to look up an account that doesn't exist and throw an error. Therefore, the account-delete function goes through all of that user's posts and assigns them to an account ID of 0. This means that, should we need to restore the account because the person changed their mind, it would take a lot of work to extract the relevant posts from account #0 (which would have several dozen deleted accounts' posts to it) and change their user IDs to the new/restored account number.

[Alps]

We could probably go through the database and delete any users with 0 posts and no activity in the last year.

[rickmastfan67]

This is also why we are extremely reluctant to delete user accounts, and usually advise people that don't want their account anymore to simply stop using it or to scramble their password. When we delete an account, the thread display script would try to look up an account that doesn't exist and throw an error. Therefore, the account-delete function goes through all of that user's posts and assigns them to an account ID of 0. This means that, should we need to restore the account because the person changed their mind, it would take a lot of work to extract the relevant posts from account #0 (which would have several dozen deleted accounts' posts to it) and change their user IDs to the new/restored account number.

Not totally true.  Deleted accounts leave their username/email in the posts instead.  So, all you would have to do inside of SMF is attribute either the username or email to the new account, and the forum will do the rest to attach the old posts to the new account.