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Fencer: To follow up some of the things recently posted on the BrainKing board & chat board.
I had a quick look at most of the users here - there are about 750 pawns who have not been on here this year at all (1200 approx counting January) - thats a 5th of the people that are users.
Would it be possible to write a small piece of programming that would automatically send an e-mail to anyone who has not been here for a while (2 months for example) reminding them of username, password & link to the site. I know of at least one site that does this twice before there details are deleted, it may encourage users back or free some space at least.
Also, there seems to be a great concern over pawns and how they slow the system down, remember those of us who are members we were all pawns once & i personally don't see any problem. It is everyones own choice to join or not, i don't think they should be punished because so far they have not joined (and ourselves for not having enough games to play).
I think at the end of the day we should look into encouraging pawns to join the membership. I read a few posts on being able to afford a 6 month / year membership all at one go. Maybe Fencer could look at setting a 3 month membership as 1 month would seem alot to keep dealing with as someone asked for. I do like pipilo's idea of having Support us, Paid Membership & Send invitation links popping up in various places could help a little.
I don't think deleting inactive pawn accounts would help much at all. It's bandwidth (information transfer capacity) that's the problem, not a few kilobytes of information stored on Fencer's server. If an inactive player is inactive, that's not affecting the site's daily traffic at all.
Also, if we send email reminders in an attempt to bring inactive pawns back, then we're just adding to the traffic, not alleviating it.
The solution needs to generate money for more powerful servers and more bandwidth, without deleting accounts or limiting moves. I'd rather have emails go out to the most active pawns, rather than to the least active. With appropriate incentives, they (at least some of them) might be encouraged to join the site.
pipilo: I fully understand that(though not alot of people will). I am just trying to get people away from this theory of how many users we have, when in fact we don't. Fencer likes the idea of encouraging pawns to join in various ways, BUT those of us that have joined needed no insentive apart from the fact its a great site, it is down to the individual.
We also have had the problem in the past where people have wanted to use ceratin names, like there own maybe that they use on other sites. We have found in the past the alot of these names have been taken BUT are not being used at all.
There has to be a point where deleting old users is needed, if you look at the brainking.info board you will see there is only a certain ammount of storage space & any piece we can save until the new server etc.... comes in must be of help.
Maybe unused names could be removed upon request? Deleting all names that haven't been used for a few months might be a good idea too, but it would be nice to send them a courtesy email first.
I agree with what you tow have said: a little extra space on the harddrive does not hurt at all, and eliminating a little space will not help the problem. BUT since you both agreed with that, I am not sure what this would accomplish:
"Maybe unused names could be removed upon request? Deleting all names that haven't been used for a few months might be a good idea too, but it would be nice to send them a courtesy email first."
Removing unused names upon request wouldn't reduce bandwidth at all, but would help solve the other, unrelated problem of people wanting to use names that may be already taken by inactive pawns.