I would love some way of doing membership purges by way of a membership search to see when a person has logged in/when they last logged in and doing a mass deletion.
This could also be used to send out a brief "hey, don't forget we're here, come back" email (via mailchimp, or another mailing list site, or the site itself, depending on how many people are in that block).
E.G:
- Do a search for all people who haven't logged in for 6 months
- Collate all these people
- Send bulk email saying "you haven't logged in for so many months, please come back"
- If they don't, offer the option for the site mod to delete them from the database.
I know that this is sometimes frowned upon, but I have a small site with a relatively large membership - grew to over 600 literally overnight - and the majority of those people haven't been back since that one visit. It gives a vastly over inflated view of site membership, causes drag in the database and would be better off purged.
First of all, in numbers of hundreds or thousands, databases size is barely relevant, so no worry there.
When it comes to activity, every deleted member that has ever been any active will result in a story/comment/review/whatnot without a related member ID, and that's not nice.
I could rather think of some sort of trigger that puts members in a "hibernation group", which would just mean they don't count towards member base size, but can come back active at any point in time.
