Duplication of membership

[JBJ]

Hi All

One of the things I've always thought about since I joined this forum a few years back, is the number of times people have joined up with repetitive occurrence.

If you look at the members on line any time, you will often see almost the same name 2, 3 or 4 times. Easily identified by duplication of email adresses, birthdays, etc.

This is caused by people having trouble trying to log on as a new member, & is not neccessarily aything else.

Take tonight as example, the one person has obviously had 3 goes.

So when a birthday comes up, it becomes really obvious what has happened.

You can also find the same thing if you scroll thru the members list.

I quickly scrolled thru, & found 35 definite duplications, thats 1 per page.

Also I reckon around 90% never post, maybe beyond the initial login.

Theres names there I remember from when I joined, that havent posted for at least 2 years. Sure they still may come on line & look, but anyone can do that. It doesnt require membership of the forum.

So from what I've pointed out, I reckon we'd be lucky to have 100 active, regurlar, & interested participants

Why cant the system be set up to present a realistic membership, or does everyone want to delude themselves on how many real time participants are current forum members

Or maybe the whole point I've raised doesnt matter. But then why bother with nominating the number of members if its not even vaguelly realistic

jailbarjuice

[Deleted]

onya JBJ .......I've been wanting to do a membership clean up for a long time.

If you email me the duplicated member user names that you think should be deleted, I'll glady delete them .

As for "inactive" members ......I also agree that they should be deleted ......if you haven't posted for 12 months, you're membership is deleted.

Maybe you could start a poll as to whether inactive members should be deleted ..........

Mark

[atouchofglass]

Forget the poll
Just do it

If you haven't contributed in 12 months you aren't interested or just have moved on.

People's interests change and some just join up as a spur of the moment thing.

It might just be the push some need to post something and join in rather than lurk.....

Coming from an exlurker......
no not that type of lurker ;D ;D

Atog

[Don Ricardo]

Hi JBJ, Mark T and ATOG,

I agree with the general principle of cleaning up the members list, and especially the duplications, but a word of caution...

If you delete people who haven't contributed for 12 or 24 months, wouldn't that mean that their posts would be deleted as well? If that is the case we could lose info, photos, contact details, etc that may be useful to us now, or may be useful in the future. In other words the info may be useful even if the poster is no longer around. Often enough I have trawled through the old posts to find something I wanted from 3 or 4 years ago, and then sometimes also been able to contact the person via their email address.

Also, if we delete people and their posts disappear, some threads may become virtually unintelligible. For example, if A and B have a discussion on line about, say, painting canvas roofs, and A's posts get deleted, then not only do we lose the info A posted but B's contributions may become useless because he/she was responding to A's comments.

I would suggest that if we do have a clean up, that only people who have posted nothing - or just a very general one or two posts - be taken off the list. If people have put up some posts which contain some info about their van or other related V V topic, leave them on, even if we haven't heard from them for a while. People do come and go a bit as well, meaning that sometimes people take an extended holiday from the forum for various reasons, and then come back on board. We need to allow for that I think. (I'm talking about people who have been active here, not people who have posted once just to say 'hi' or 'I'm looking for an old van'.)

Don Ricardo

[sportsman1]

Hi all,

you will see I am writing this under my "sportsman1" tag. When I first joined I took the name "Sportsman 1" (with the space between n and 1) but my logon was griff. I did not realise at the time that if you did a search for Sportsman 1 you could not find it, you would only find it if you searched for griff.
I posted a long time ago to see if anyone knew how to change griff to Sportsman 1 but nobody knew. I tried to join a second time using Sportsman 1 but it said it was not available so I joined as Sportsman1 (no gap).
I usually post under Sportsman 1 but occasionally I logon with the other just to check my messages.
I, therefore am active under 2 names. Bit silly really. I would rather have done it the other way but I did not want to lose/waste all the posts I had built up over time.

I would certainly change my settings to one only if someone can tell me how.

cheers, Leigh.

[JBJ]

Hi leigh,

This is what I've tried to point out. Its possible Mark can sort it out with the list I've compiled for him.

Its only a minor point in the grand scheme of things, but should be able to be fixed so people dont have to do what you had to to log on.


Incidently, while I've had a couple of quiet hours work wise, I went thru the members list.

There are only 191 members that have posted 10 or more times, and 378 that have never posted at all.

I've found 21 definite duplications, including some 3 logins.

I,m sending info to Mark for his records.


Amazing the things you find yourself doing when your bored & stuck in front of the computer. ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

Jailbarjuice

[scootman]

Wow JBJ thats a good effort. RE memebership. My thoughts are that there a lurkers like myself who dont post very often but do read the site almost everyday. But then there are those who just joined on the spurr of the moment and then didnt continue.
Is it possible to send an email to these people saying. WE've noticed your account hasnt been used in the last 12 months,. Please log on now to avoid your account being deleted?
Cheers Scoot

[Deleted]

Hi JBJ
you wrote:
"Amazing the things you find yourself doing when your bored & stuck in front of the computer.

Jailbarjuice "

What ya need is a few days lazing away on a vintage van trip..... Reality will soon swallow up any cyber forum member statistical stress.

I fully understand what you have posted here re current and active/non active members.
I made the comment about active members before we went to MT Gambier. I estimated about 100 active forum members and about 50 active members around OZ (the ones that actually use their vans))
Wasnt too far off the money with 35 to 40 turning up at the mount..
.
Inactive members
Dunno what the answer is and i suppose it doesnt really matter whilever there isnt any law that says we have to keep a true and accurate record of "members"....hmmmm maybe subscribers or contributors might be better terminology..... keep in mind here the old punch line.. "We are not a club".

Its just one of those annoying statistical glitches that sit there and is bought to the surface every now and then... usually gets thrown in the too hard basket down the track because of all the reasons Don Ricardo has mentioned.

Multiple user id,s for the same person ??

How come i was allowed back in as "Reddo" after i unsubscribed from the forum a while back. ... more to the point .. How come i was allowed back in at all.... .... I say "Opportunity to eradict a vemin lost" ;D ;D

Reddo ..
Rank: Private 1st class File: ... 0000145
with 66 posts a day .....not bloody likely to become an inactive contributor.
.

[cobber]

G'day JBJ,

A worthy project you have taken on here.
The 375 “members” you have identified as having never posted could be the first to get the chop, as you said, they would still be able to visit the site and see what is going on..... of course the problem is that they, and anybody else, can join up again and the same situation will eventually arise again.

I don't think Don R's fear is true that deleting some members would result in lost postings, as 'arold mentioned, when he spat the dummy and expelled himself the dribble he had posted over the years remained................................................. thankfully .

I sometimes think it would be a good idea to prevent “guests” from having the ability to post messages, most of the rubbish stuff comes from “guests”....most people who have something sensible to say become members.

The potentially saddest thing that could happen on this forum is the danger of loosing all our photos if photobucket crashes, already many photos have disappeared because some people don't realise that if they delete photos from their photobucket account those photos are no longer available to this forum, it has been mentioned before but I just thought it was worth reiterating.

Cobber.

[Daggsey]

This topic is not unlike the following recent thread which seemed to die a natural death.......

"Re: 900 members
« Reply #7 on 5 May, 2008, 9:26am »
When I was building the motor for "Effacy" last Christmas, I logged onto a site that gave some details on EFI systems. I was trying to hunt down the electrical wiring diagram and I had to "register" to get the details. One of the requirements to keep that registration active (it was free), was that I had to contribute something within the next 30 days or I was automatically removed from the list. Seemed a bit silly to register just to get some details and I never contributed anything, but in a round about sort of way I suppose it gave the administrators of that site some idea of "active" members."

Probably doesn't really get round the double membership issue, but may aleviate having non-proactive (or is that non-active ;D ;D) "registered members" inflating our "figures".

Just my thoughts

Daggsey

[JBJ]

HiAll

the purpose of my raising this issue stems originally from the problems many people had, similar to that of sportsman 1.


The result is that some have logged in 2 or even 3 times to try to be members. Some of the problems happened when the system changed years ago.

The problem also occurs when people change their email. It can be seen that its probably easier to log on fresh rather than change details if your not real good on the computer.

I believe that the administrators of the forum should be able to do a list of members by various criteria, such as Date of Birth, Email adress, etc, & then duplications become apparent.

Where the weeding out of duplications is difficult, is that several different log on criteria have been used on the forum. Many dont have any details listed other than log in name.

I believe that their should be certain criteria need to be listed. It doesnt need to accessible to the public. But the administrators should be able to access & contact anyone posting on the forum.

Maybe guests should have to log in to be able to post. I'd have no problems with that.

I also believe it should be that non posting members drop off after a set period of time. I know of quite a few that havent posted for years, & several that have said they wont post again for various reasons.


Anyone can browse, & if the system is set right, anyone can post as a guest, or rejoin if they wish.

But as it said in my earlier post, maybe none of this even matters.


Jailbarjuice

[Don Ricardo]

May 14, 2008 13:47:12 GMT 10 cobber said:

I don't think Don R's fear is true that deleting some members would result in lost postings, as 'arold mentioned, when he spat the dummy and expelled himself the dribble he had posted over the years remained................................................. thankfully

....

The potentially saddest thing that could happen on this forum is the danger of loosing all our photos if photobucket crashes, already many photos have disappeared because some people don't realise that if they delete photos from their photobucket account those photos are no longer available to this forum, it has been mentioned before but I just thought it was worth reiterating.

Hi all,

Thanks Cobber for your comment regarding Reddo's posts. I actually was under the impression that when Reddo unsubscribed himself last year all his previous 1800 odd posts disappeared with him, which was why I expressed my word of caution. I have just done a search and found some of Reddo's posts going back to 2005, so if they went away when he deleted himself, they came back when he re-registered!! Reddo may remember what happened, but I thought all his posts turned to red crosses or something, or his photos did, or something along those lines??

There is a possibility that when Reddo re-registered Proboards was clever enough to somehow link him back to his posts which were still in the system? I'm not trying to dig myself out of a hole here - well, only a little bit - but I suggest we do a little bit of testing with some sample posts just to see what happens before we go too far and regret it.

I'm happy to be told I'm wrong and that there's nothing to worry about, if that's the case.

Regarding archiving the website to protect the forum against a Photobucket crash, I recently heard a news item saying that the National Library has set up a system to archive Australian based websites for posterity. I think they only do an archive sweep once a year, but once a year would be better than never.

I'm not sure how the National Library selects 'Australian websites', but they may not pick up the V V site because it is a ".com" not a ".com.au". Perhaps Mark T (as official owner of the website) could contact the National Library and ask them to ensure that the www.vintagecaravans.com is picked up by their system. I reckon there's a good argument for it being included on the basis that the website has incorporated a lot of valuable Australian historical material, apart from anything else. And besides, Reddo's posts should be archived as a fine example of contemporary Australian literature!! ;D ;D

Just a few more thoughts.

Don Ricardo

[Roehm3108]

Perhaps Reddo is "Simply Irremovable" ;D ;D ;D
Ray

[atouchofglass]

Greetings all

Sooooo..............

What's the verdict?

Have we a decision?

Will there be a clean up and if so......

What will be done and when?


Atog the interested

[JBJ]

Hi Atog,


I had email from Mark requesting info I had, so I sent it to him. His comment was that he would look at it when he had a chance.

Jailbarjuice