I don't think admins should delete accounts no matter what, because 1: Banned members. They may want to have evidence of what they have done. And 2: Unactive members may pop around one time

I know SSD deleted them because they were requested to by Patrick Clinger. We had 18,000 members and more than 8000 had zero posts. So Peter created a script that auto-deleted them to help relieve stress on server 15/16/17

o ya that was another thing that I;ve always wondered about - how a forum could exist on 3 servers. That's a very cool thing.

and ya I noticed member count drops at DX5, SoCal etc.

There are several servers like that. It is actually one giant server that used to be three but had to be merged for stress reasons. There used to be another large forum on 15 (cannot remember the name) and Proboards just merged the three together to use for SSD and that forum and for back-ups.

Member counts and activity seem to be dropping in a lot of places.

hmm... well.... although i don't believe in deleting members, it is kind of annoying when only like 10 out of 800 are active.

Some people only judge a forum by their member and post counts.

I dont see the point of getting rid of members on site, because you never know when a member might just pop up and starting posting out of the blue. So i never get rid of any members incase they come back. Sometimes the number count of a site brings in members ( more of a 50/50 chance) I dont get rid of posts or members i think to see how much the site has grown since being open.

Well if SSD was forced to, that's another story, but yeah, deleting accounts for inactivity isn't the best thing to do. There's a chance people might come back (...uh...maybe), but it still raises the member count which a lot of people do look at.

I've indefinitely banned accounts for resource whoring and costing me money out of my own pocket. Other than that I've never deleted a member, and on the rare occasion a thread if I or another mod deemed it delete-worthy.

Since Peter and Pat run so close together I'm sure it was no biggy for them to chop off a huge proportion of, in short, null members.

I've never deleted any members...not enough to start doing that. It only makes the forum look good with alot of them I guess. However by looking at the number its totally inaccurate because some forums like graphics and coding or advertisement will have a ton of members but less activity.

SoCal is one of those sites that does that. Why? Because Cali did and we're keeping that as one of the traditions. Some ProBoards forums also do that to keep the member count below 1000 so they can use the top posters feature. SZ will delete zero poster accounts once we get to the point where we need to do so to keep the top posters feature working.

Past those reasons, I've never really seen a reason to do so. I can understand if you run a forum on your own server and want to delete members to clear up small amounts of your DB space or to increase loading times by the SQL queries having to search through less files.

I know a site with nearly 7 million registered users and over 1 billion posts. The site has access to huge amounts of resources though, so they never have to worry about clearing out data.