Post or be deleted!

[frm]

Ayep. That's the philosophy I have on my forums. My primary site has over 300 registered users and only about 3-4 actually participate. I don't worry about it.
I have seen admins that send out DM's asking their users to participate more. To me, that is more likely to drive folks away. But... what do I know?

In a circumstance like this, I would just add the inactive users to a new user group so that you can exclude them from receiving newsletters/mass communications as they could have bad email addresses that would contribute to your bounce rate when they're emailed one of them.

 

[Tracy]

user group so that you can exclude them from receiving newsletters/mass communications as they could have bad email addresses that would contribute to your bounce rate when they're emailed one of them.

After 45 days of no activity they don't get newsletters sent anyway.
And if their emails bounce, the bounce feature in XF disables any further sending of emails, thereby not highly endangering my SES account, other than the abuse vector that was pointed out to the XF developers and they said was not a concern so they decided to ignore it, even after being told it was being abused.
Just one more reason I'm not very enamored of the current crop of Xenforo developers and their attitude.

 

[Heatman]

Sarcasm doesn't carry well on the internet.
But honestly, if they have lost their email account (or let it get trashed and deleted) or they can't remember their credentials, they can set up a new account. If... and that is a big IF... they can later confirm that their old account is the same as the new one, I may merge them.
But sorry, I'm not going to simply reset someones password because they tell me "hey, I don't have my old email any more and I don't remember what my password was". No, my site does not have national security secrets on it, but I do owe a level of security to my users. Social engineering has been a thing for years and years, and admins of websites are no more exempt from it than anyone else.


The point was if they were a prolific user (or even a regular user) and had to go away for a while and then forgot their password and their old email was no longer valid, how exactly are you going to confirm they are who they said they are if they want you to manually change the password and give it to them or change the email. To simply do that without due diligence worries me more than having to send in a scan of my drivers license that can be checked. If they want to continue using the old account, they are going to have to confirm that they have the right to, and sorry, I'm not going to take the "just trust me" routine. Many a young lady has found out that was a path that they probably did not want to walk.

It's very understandable not to just trust a random user when they can't prove they are the real owners of the account.

The only way I can wave such is take for instance someone like me with my screen name Heatman that I've used for years and probably lost access to my account on a particular forum. If someone like that meet me the forum owner in another board and tell me that he no longer have access to his email to reset password for his so so account on the forum. I will reset it and give him a new login details.

This is just what I would do. I don't know if another person might be willing to do same.