I have pondered this question myself. After a considerable amount of thought, I have concluded that deleting members would be a negative response from the forum itself. If someone signs up, goes out of town, gets busy and doesn't return for a month or so, and then to find their membership deleted. You would then probably start getting the hate messages in your inbox! Now, this is not to say that if you decided to make it one of your rules of the forum (after 3 months of inactivity you have the right to delete their account), then they could not say much as far as you not being fair. This of course just my opinion, and for the record I do not delete any member from my forum unless they request it personally. Seems to work better that way.

I agree. I don't delete members for anything other than serious, repeated rule violations, or at their request. We've had people show up after months of inactivity, and I presume that had they been deleted, they wouldn't have bothered to rejoin. I think one should do everything possible to facilitate forum participation, and deletion seems to have disadvantages, and no significant advantages.

See, I never delete - not even at their request. Rule violators get banned (so that they can't rejoin with the same e-mail address or username). And if they want to be unsubscribed, they simply have to go into their user preferences and choose to never receive email from the forum system. And then out of sight out of mind.

Actually physically deleting members gets messy. If they posted, their usernames turn into Anonymous users, you can no longer get a nice list of all their posts from their profile, it's just yucky from a site organization / intuitiveness point of view.

yes i have strong policy of not deleting anything including both members and posts. this allows me to refrence past events in our websites history. if a member wants to be deleted then i say just leave and dont return.

Besides, people can simply remove all their personal info from their profile if they are really concerned about privacy and such.

One thing is that deleting members will lead to problems as outlined by cscgal. I would never delete members even on request.

I don't delete users either - I just pernamently ban them.

Hello,

I am glad that we do not delete users, nor do we hard delete problem posts. I too see the administration nightmare.

Christian

I cherish everyone of my few users

As a forum user (ie not a forum provider) i would be fairly annoyed if my account was deleted without a request. Maybe one option might be to send an email after 3 months of inactivity just to remind the account holder that the forum still exists. The email could include some sort of news update such as forum growth, new areas of interest, site changes etc. This might tempt the user to start returning to the forum.

Mike.