Should MR have a guest/temporary user system?

[Scarlet Fever]

I was looking at the member list, and there are 82,759 members, and (after a bit of searching), I found that there are just short of 8400 members who have MR Member status or greater. That leaves around 78,000 members who are newbie.

My guess is that a lot of those members have posted once to get a solution to a problem, and haven't read the forums again. I'm sure some of you know how hard it is to get a user name in places like AIM, Hotmail, even Gmail. The number of available usernames that don't have obscure characters in them are dwindling.

I reckon a good solution may be a temporary account system or a guest system. Temporary accounts can be terminated after a set time, like a week or a month, and a guest doesn't have to register anything appart from their email address for email updates.

Is this possible with the current vBulletin system? Is it a good concept, even?

[Compile 'em all]

I vote for the guest system. But how will you implement usernames for guests? will they have the username Guest? what happenes if more than one guest post on the same thread?. If you implement usernames for guests then still you need to resolve collisions between guest names. I still think a guest system is a good idea to combat this 1-time posters issue.

[dukebound85]

guest1, guest2 haha those are the guest names and they expire after a week. that would work

[smueboy]

Maybe it would be a good idea to have 'newbie' accounts expire - i.e. if there is a, say, 6 month period without a single post by someone with a newbie account then the account goes bye bye (maybe a warning email 1 week before). I'm sure many people join, post a few things and then either never come back or at least never post - i know i've done that in other forums :)

[Scarlet Fever]

Maybe it would be a good idea to have 'newbie' accounts expire - i.e. if there is a, say, 6 month period without a single post by someone with a newbie account then the account goes bye bye (maybe a warning email 1 week before). I'm sure many people join, post a few things and then either never come back or at least never post - i know i've done that in other forums :)

yeah thats another thought i had. It almost falls under the temporary account idea. And yes, I've done that in other forums as well ;)

[eluk]

I was looking at the member list, and there are 82,759 members, and (after a bit of searching), I found that there are just short of 8400 members who have MR Member status or greater. That leaves around 78,000 members who are newbie.



The only downside is for MR. Much kudos from . ;)

[smueboy]

I wonder what the influx was over MWSF?
I know the lust for the C2D MBP is what caused me to join, so i'm sure the newbie flood was large last week. So the premise of 'use it or lose it' would be practical from the MR admin perspective.

[Eraserhead]

All they need to do is to clear out all the newbie accounts who haven't posted in the last year or so...

[Kingsly]

there are 82,759 members, and (after a bit of searching), I found that there are just short of 8400 members who have MR Member status or greater. That leaves around 78,000 members who are newbie.
:eek:


The auto deletion of newbie accounts after a year sure would tidy MR up a bit...

[Dont Hurt Me]

No, it holds down the trolls.

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

I don't get this obsession with cleaning out old newbie accounts... the topic pops up at alarmingly regular intervals, in one form or another.... do they really bother you so much...? :confused:

[NJuul]

I vote for deleting newbies after one year of inactivity.
I'd for one like to get my name as a username, but that was taken by some guy who joined 05-19-2005 and never even once posted! What a waste of a (fine ;)) name!

[Markleshark]

I don't get this obsession with cleaning out old newbie accounts... the topic pops up at alarmingly regular intervals, in one form or another.... do they really bother you so much...? :confused:

I must agree. I can't for the life of me see what difference it would make to anyone.

[Xeem]

No, it holds down the trolls.

I agree that allowing guest posts definitely will increase trolls in the forums substantially, but I'm OK with temporary users as long as there are some barriers up for the trolls.

[Eraserhead]

I must agree. I can't for the life of me see what difference it would make to anyone.

Because if say I had registered and never made any posts. Then if someone else wanted to be called Eraserhead they'd have to be Eraserhead1 or something which is a bit rubbish.

[Scarlet Fever]

I must agree. I can't for the life of me see what difference it would make to anyone.
I vote for deleting newbies after one year of inactivity.
I'd for one like to get my name as a username, but that was taken by some guy who joined 05-19-2005 and never even once posted! What a waste of a (fine ;)) name!


that is exactly the reason why I thought I'd bring it up So many usernames are taken by users who registered years ago but havent even posted yet.

[Dont Hurt Me]

that is exactly the reason why I thought I'd bring it up So many usernames are taken by users who registered years ago but havent even posted yet.
This is a issue for sure, but a temp user account isnt the answer. I think if you havent posted in a yr or two a name shouldnt be tied up. I wanted to change my name but the one I wanted to use was taken by someone with 3 posts and hadnt posted in years. The names should be cleaned up evey year or two.

[Cassie]

As Arn (Or was it Doctor Q?) Pointed out once, there was a member who signed up three or four years ago, and made his first post recently.

Deleting the accounts would've forced this person to sign up again.

I got lucky with my name. (Turns out it's the 310th most popular name; even though it's not my full name.) If you don't get your's, you're just going to have to deal with it.

[TheAnswer]

I'm not really for it because I suspect a lot of the lurkers still subscribe to threads without posting in them, look at the forum spy with excluded forums and have settings in their user CPs that would be wiped out. And I don't really think everyone should be required to post every so often just to keep their settings and subscriptions...sure, it isn't that hard to come up with one post every six months, but I suspect a lot of people are just lurking and learning.

[killr_b]

On most of the chat boards I visit the Guest or Anonymous posts are always flame or insults or just generally stupid.

Registering keeps it classy. :cool:

[dllavaneras]

I got lucky with my name. (Turns out it's the 310th most popular name; even though it's not my full name.)

Where do you get that statistic?

I also don't see what the problem is. If the server is about to get fried because of all the extra accounts, then yes, go ahead and send a mass email to those who haven't posted in 6 months, a year, etc and if they reply then don't delete them.

[MacNut]

Back in the day there was a guest system but Arn did away with it.

[bousozoku]

I would imagine that someone who has few posts may have many subscriptions to threads. They want to follow the news, but don't have anything much to say or don't feel comfortable for some reason.

If there would be a cleanout of people who don't post, it would be useful to look at someone who hasn't had any activity of any kind. Other than making really big numbers, what do they hurt?

Guests and temporary users are often trolls on other sites and forums so I don't think that's a good idea.

[ReanimationLP]

Who cares about the newbie accounts that are inactive. Hey, it lets us brag a bit. MacRumors has over 80,000 registered members!

:P

Allowing guests would just wave a big red flag for trolls.

[Eraserhead]

Deleting the accounts would've forced this person to sign up again.

Would that really be a big deal? Look if they wanted to keep their account they could PM a mod or something.

[MacNut]

Would that really be a big deal? Look if they wanted to keep their account they could PM a mod or something.That wold be more work on the Mods that they don't need to deal with. Having guests makes it harder to control, How do you ban a guest because you know the most of them will just spam.

[Eraserhead]

That wold be more work on the Mods that they don't need to deal with. Having guests makes it harder to control, How do you ban a guest because you know the most of them will just spam.

No, you misunderstand, I don't think I support guest/temporary accounts, as it makes it more difficult to get people to keep posting, rather that any accounts with no or very few posts that haven't posted for ages should be closed.

[Cassie]

Where do you get that statistic?

Google "Baby name wizard". Some of them tell you how popular your name was in what years.

[wmmk]

as arn said in another one of these threads, some people edit MR guides, but but never post. I don't think the wiki software can work with vB to keep these users from being deleted.