Of the last 25 users that signed up, only 3 people have posted more then 10 posts. A lot of people that come to these forums sign up just to post one or two posts, then never come back. That's probably because they don't realise that guest posting is turned on. I think that if you were to delete any users that have not posted for three months, the number of users would be considerably shorter.

who cares?

Exactly. What would be achieved by deleting the accounts?

Actually, the ones who really bug me are those who log in under different names and claim to be different people. Now they need deleting...

davidw wrote:Exactly. What would be achieved by deleting the accounts?

Actually, the ones who really bug me are those who log in under different names and claim to be different people. Now they need deleting...

rofl, i agree.

The reason I said this is because it is just taking up space on the server or whatever, and this would make it take a while to load. If you remove dormant accounts, it would reduce the amount of space on the server, and therefore make it a smaller time downloading for people on slow computers (i.e ME)

I kind of doubt empty low-posting accounts are taking up enough room on any server to slow it down.

How much space is an account which has never been used likely to take? Not a lot.

oh my god now the dude is talking to himself? wtf??

anyway.....

It doesn't take up hardly ANY space since the user data is stored into a single file and database. It's forums like YaBB which have seperate files for each user. So even if we had 1000 users with no posts it wouldn't effect the download of anything on the forum hardly.

This is phpBB... stores the accounts and post info in a couple of SQL tables. (mySQL probably)

It tkes about 0.01 second longer with 1000 accounts... It really isn't that big of a deal. It's your position on the globe, the position of the server on the globe, your ISP's performance and the speed of your connection which makes downloading the page slow... Also the load on the server at that specific time - but generally that isn't too much of an issue.

exactly: the server this is hosted on is in the UK (or somewhere thereabouts), and I'm in Australia. The data would have to travel half way across the globe just to get to my house. Then there's the fact that I'm now using Firefox (against my wishes), which won't load pages nearly as fast as IE, and both computers are really slow (one runs Win 98, and was bought several years ago, the other's C:\ is clogged up because my Dad doesn't know what he's doing with his My Documents folder). So when you add everything up, I'm sure that it wouldn't hurt to delete some users who registered when the forums were started and never came back.

[EDIT] on a somewhat related topic, one of my computers says that the latest user to sign up was 'Definitely not Davidw', the 105th user, while my other one says 111 users have signed up. Any idea why this may be?

Confusing exchange there.

007Bond says that having 1,000 empty accounts dramatically slows things down.

Computer Whizz says it's doesn't.

007Bond responds with "exactly".

007bond wrote:I'm sure that it wouldn't hurt to delete some users who registered when the forums were started and never came back.

As there are only 105 registered users on the forum, how many do you think would have to be deleted before any increase in speed was noted? According to Computer Whizz, 1000 empty accounts would only take 0.1 of a second extra to load.

I think the problem probably lies with your computer. I'd guess alternatively logging in as 007Bond and Codingmasters is slowing things down.

Hint: the entire list of user details is not transmitted every time you request a page from this forum. More users has absolutely no effect on the time it takes to get a page.

To see this principle in action go to http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/ and observe a forum that at the time of writing this has 145,092 registered users.

Hey, some of us, like me, may ont make many posts, by but we keep coming back and watching the community. We haven't forgotten Quest, we just don't always have anything to add about it.

Oooh, passerby, of course (fully registered single account holder). We're excited to hear that you keep coming back and watching the community and that you haven't forgotten Quest and don't have anything to add.

Alex wrote:Hint: the entire list of user details is not transmitted every time you request a page from this forum. More users has absolutely no effect on the time it takes to get a page.

To see this principle in action go to http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/ and observe a forum that at the time of writing this has 145,092 registered users.

lol exactly. That forum has over 1million posts, over 145 THOUSAND members, and around 40+ people on at a time, not to mention.... "Most users ever online was 620 on Wed Oct 22, 2003 10:31 am", and that forum still loads up faster than it takes me to click the tab to view the page.

point proven.

Firefox doesn't display pages slower than IE does. The problem comes from the computer instead.

I actually find Firefox to be faster.

I agree, Firefox is faster. That's why it's a good browser.

steve

Thunderbird and Firefox are really good softwares. They display fast and efficiently, the design is clean etc. The problem is they are both VERY much ressources consuming (but yet fast anyway), they load the memory far too much

exactly, and on a computer that has 64 MB of RAM, your screwed, especially when you're trying to listen to music. Luckily I've written my own small program to play music, so it's not a worry there.

[EDIT] forgot to say, but another thing I don't really like about Firefox is that it loads tables cell by cell, not table by table, and there is no way to change this. IE loads tables table by table

Aren't tables decpreciated from HTML 4.0?

Anyway - the amount of users over time would slow it down - but I'm guessing the posts will takkes the largest amount of time (the "mySQL" database has to select a few entries from over a million of them)... BUT As I said, very little time will be added - and the serve will probably be a dual/quad Xeon system or something like that so it won't slow it down much... And the mySQL (or whatever they use) is quite efficient too.

Now explain those last three lines in English

007bond wrote:Now explain those last three lines in English

he's talking about the speed of the web server, and the efficiancy of the database which stores user and post data in. (i presume)

OK. So then it probably is just my computer.

Correct Ste.

Yeah sorry - just keep forgetting other people haven't messed around with PHP and stuff... But the bulitin board runs using PHP, which saves all posts to a database (anyone used Access here!?) which is kind of like a big array... It uses SQL to get stuff back and put it onto the web-page.

Having hosted an active board myself.
You'll find that on nearly all boards alot of user sign up and don't post much.

Some of the time its just to lurk for a bit, other times its to reply to the one message they can't reply to as a guest. Even on a forum that has guests, people will sign up so they can show others who is replying. The list goes on

However having a lot of signed up users can, sometimes attract people to have a look at the community, which is never a bad thing.

It is I, Jakk. I've been lurking for quite some time now... I never really post or anything as most of the things I have to say get spouted out by others before I can type in my password and click the page...

Anyway...

I'd just like to express my pure hatred for Codingmasters or whatever he'd like to be called... He is, from my point of view, a pain. He posts stupid topics such as this one, which is taking up all this precious space he's trying to save...

Kind of messed up, eh?

Welcome back Jakk - haven't seen you in ages!
I agree on the most part.

I think we should all try and ignore 007masters. He's just some silly kid who wants people to pay attention to him so he starts lots of silly threads like this. Ignore him and he might even go away.