Sorry about the needy headline, we really want all our members to read this. We’re doing some work to the website in order to try to streamline things and make it run a little bit smoother and a little bit quicker. We also want to limit the amount of information we keep about members, even if that information is only really limited to email addresses.
We made a recent update to our terms when you log in as a member and we posted notice back in August on the forums to let people know that we were going to cull the inactive accounts in our database. Basically, the size of the database is making it tricky to work on anything that links to a member’s name. This is obviously something we’d like to avoid.
Over the years, thousands of members have signed up to enter competitions, leave a single comment or simply because they forgot previous sign in details and created a new account. These accounts are easily identifiable because they have so few TSA Points. You get a point for every day you visit the site and are signed in and there are two points awarded for commenting on a story.
So, next week we’ll be deleting all accounts from our database that have fewer than ten TSA Points. Obviously this won’t apply to brand new accounts, we don’t want to delete someone who only just signed up and is going to go on to become a great contributor to the community. We’ll only allow accounts which are over 30 days old to be erased. This is a permanent measure and one which we’ll probably repeat from time to time (or automate) to ensure that the member database is kept as relevant as possible.
We think that any member who hasn’t visited the site ten times or commented five times is probably not going to miss their account but if there are any serious issues with this, please leave a comment and we’ll try to work with you to remedy any problems.
If you need to check your TSA Points total, you can do so by signing in to the site and looking here.
PhobiaB13
Hopefully this comment brings me up to ten points :)
JohnnyBoy
Me too…
three_leg_jake
Escaped the cull hammer on yet another site!
Chuggy
Looks like its time to get opinionated then!
humanfish
I better get posting then and build those points. Can I get a bonus batch of points for being a long-time daily lurker :)
scavenga
What?I have no more than 2470 points? :o
I gotta come in more often and whine some more.
Jumping Monks
Sounds like a fair idea to me, having a good old clean out is never a bad thing imo.
Forrest_01
Might be a silly question, but what happens if someone participates regularly in the forums, but not so much on the news stories etc?
Doesn’t apply to me of course, but just wondered really.
nofi
They’d still get points as they’re logged in and visiting. =)
Forrest_01
Yeah, that’s true (as you get a point each time you log in right?) – Posts in the forums don’t add points though do they?
Although, even if it was just on logging in, it would still only take 11 visits, so ‘snot so bad! :)
cam the man
You could also delete accounts that have been inactive for a certain amount of time, say a year or two. Just a thought.
RedStarGlow
Go ahead, I can just create more! :-)
LeftyFlip
60pts FTW… 62 now (happy_face.jpg)