Oh okay. What kind of registration tweaks do you do? Oh I never said that you tried to hide the true member count.. But, I think the inactive members definitely help Daniweb. We have tons of members, and I think Daniweb is one of the most successful tech forums on the web!

hah.. I initially just joined for a little help with java, and I didn't contribute much. But I'm trying to be more involved now..

Also note that there is no compulsion to post as a member of DaniWeb, lots of members use us to get the help they need by reading the posts of others.

While it would be nice if more people contributed by posting, it would be quite wrong to punish those who do not.

Plus, there is an argument in favor of it being better for people with nothing to add, well, to add nothing...

Well the registration form is very simple and straightforward. It only asks essential information. Upon registering, people get a nice, friendly email from me (even with my "signature"!) saying to click the link. They get reminder emails every couple of days. When they log into DaniWeb, there's a message across the top indicating they haven't yet activated their account.

I wonder how many of those attempts were for spam purposes.

I have a quick thought. Many persons who join the forums are usually students who are required to take a course, for example C++. After the student has completed their course and have received the help from the forum, many never return here. So the inactive accounts/profiles...pretty much just hang around..

What kind of bureaucratic clown requires you to keep records on registration attempts that are not completed? Sounds like either government (too nosy) or some pencil and bean counting red-tapeworm with nothing else to do.

Doesnt daniweb have member pruning?

Like no activity for 12 months = deletion?

> What kind of bureaucratic clown requires you to keep records ...

Bill Clinton. Or rather, all of the details of Bill Clinton's 1996 anti-spam act. My web hosting company then has additional policies when it comes to sending out as much email as we do.

> Doesnt daniweb have member pruning?

Firstly, there are many users who log in but just don't post. Secondly, it's against the law for us to delete records. According to anti-spam laws and regulations, we have to retain detailed records on any user who we have ever sent any email to (including welcome emails, monthly newsletters, etc), and need to be able to produce that record upon being asked for it.

It all comes down to the sheer volume of email that we send out. Our monthly newsletters go to roughly 150,000 people in one shot, and that doesn't include the thousands of welcome emails and subscription emails that get sent out daily. Because we do sent out so much email, we CONSTANTLY have to keep proving ourselves to all of the big ISPs out there that we aren't spammers but that the users who receive email from us really did register with DaniWeb. We have to provide so many details about the users, such as the exact time they registered, the IP they registered with, the exact time they clicked the activation email link, the IP they clicked the link with, the actual unique activation link they had, etc., to prove that we didn't just buy a list off of spammers.

For example, I might get a message from Yahoo! with a list of two or three @yahoo.com email addresses and have 3 days to provide all of the details about those email addresses down to who they are and all of the details about when and how they registered and activated their accounts. If I can't provide that information, my webhosting company cancels my account and @daniweb.com gets blacklisted with Yahoo!.

Sometimes i would receive Monthly Digest on my bulk folder..