Web site database cleanup

[Puybaret]

Hello,

Maybe some of you noticed it at bottom of the forum main page but the number of forum members has been more than one million for a few weeks now. It's not a problem for this forum which happens to handle it without problems.
But as many forum members are either fake or not used at all, I decided to clean up the database today to remove the members who didn't log in for years, except if they wrote a message in the forum or host homes in the Online version. Even if it's quite conservative, I ended up to remove 63% of all the registered members!
Of course, I made a backup before this cleanup, so if you feel some of your data is missing, just tell me, I'll try to recover your data.

As all the homes hosted on the server take also a lot of disk space (even if it's optimized), I wonder if I should also remove accounts with old homes designed by users who didn't log in during the past years.
Not a very exciting subject, but if you have any idea of the criteria I should use to perform a more efficient cleanup, please share them.

[hansmex]

Use a 3 or 5-yeear limit?
To be polite you could send a message to those users, informing them their account and project(s) will be deleted in 1 (or more) month(s).

[Keet]

Make it a general rule for online users: a requirement to log in at least once a year to keep your account (and homes). Many sites have such a rule with different time spans fitting the subject.

Send the current users with stored homes a message about this new rule.
For all accounts (online&forum): as a courtesy you could send a reminder a few weeks before removal.

[Waldemar.Hersacher]

I'm with hansmex and Keet.
On other forums I have seen that they use a pseudo member named "Inactive" and assigned the forum post to this member before deleting the real one.

[Puybaret]

Thanks for the suggestions.
Sending a message to users to warn inactive users that their project will be deleted within a month is a good idea. Just wonder how many mail addresses are still valid among the ten thousand ones that should be sent. I will have to program something to handle this automatically.

[Keet]

Carefull with automatically sending emails to ten thousand email adresses. It's easy to get black listed for spamming and very hard to reverse that. Do it in smaller blocks spread over multiple days. It's a little harder on the mail server, but try to send them as individual emails or limit the number of adresses in the BCC (never use the CC for this).

[Puybaret]

Thanks for your concern. It’s the number one thing which bothers me.

[Waldemar.Hersacher]

Some years ago my company was sending a newsletter to customers about our participation in an exhibition.
The newsletter was blocked by our ISP.
I think the solution was to use a special e-mail address which is only used for mass e-mail.
It might be a good idea to contact your ISP to get reliable information how to send mass e-mails.

[Keet]

Contacting the ISP for information is a good idea but the ISP is not the one you have to worry about with blacklisting. You have to worry about spamhaus.org. One thing the ISP can do or help with is making sure the email server is configured correctly. That is very important.

There's a long list of 'rules' to avoid being blacklisted. Just do a search for "How to avoid email blacklisting" and you will find multiple sites with good advise how to do this.
One of the items on that list is to only use 'good' email addresses, addresses to which an email can be delivered. In this case that is a problem because some (and maybe many) are definitely not in use anymore.