Emeritus wrote:

This is a welcome change, James.  How long before you complete doing it?

It's going to be a bit.  I'm about half way thru the Founder level accounts now, it's pretty time consuming to go thru by hand & find each account, send a notice, give a reasonable amount of time for them to address it, answer questions/give help along the way, and then move the ones who don't respond to Inactive.  It'll actually speed up as we move ahead since we did start requiring 2 images & an avatar some time back, when I get to that point it'll get easier.

Next phase once this cleanup's done will be moving accounts who haven't logged in for long periods to Inactive status.

On the upside to this process, we've had a lot of people come back & spruce up their accounts & get active again, I've also been tagging walls & commenting on pics of accounts that meet the rules but are "dead" and that's got folks returning.

Emeritus wrote:

I'm surprised there isn't an automated way to do the screening and notifications.  As the site grows this isn't a process that you can expect to do by hand.

There will be an automated system for accounts that aren't logged in to in the future.  As noted, new accounts are required to put up an avatar & 2 images, so that's less of an issue now.

However, there're also disadvantages to doing this with an automated process.  We tried some experiments a few months back with taking accounts that hadn't logged in for long periods & sending them an email & moving the account to "Inactive" when there was no reply.  1 or 2 out of ten responded to the email or logged in.

With this new batch, I'm sending individual personal PMs and 6-7 out of 10 are logging in & responding, most of them are also addressing the issues.  So it's more labor intensive, but the personal approach is getting MUCH better results.

We see an echo of this with the weekly checks I run on people who sign up but never complete their registration & activate their accounts, I send them emails offering help & 9 out of 10 never answer.  When we did the initial cleanup of accounts that'd never completed registration or never set a plan I used all mass emails and got a tiny percentage of responses.  Most just ended up deleted.

If the more labor-intensive process & showing we actually care about our members makes this big of a difference (and it seems to) in engaging people, then it's worth it.   
That's always been one of the goals of this site, we're about the community & its members and we'll work to prove it.

AC Photography wrote:

Thanks for the kick in the ass, James!!! hahahaha....

You're welcome!  As a bit of an update, we're about 1/2 way through the Founder accounts.  We're reaching out to people on a personal level, not using an automated process.  A number of folks have responded & updated, and along the way we've been reaching out to folks whose accounts met the rules but who hadn't been here for a long time, in some cases since they made their accounts.  Several of them have responded by coming back & updating as well.

We realize we made a mis-step by not requiring images & avatars when we first set up the site, it made the place look empty & kept a lot of folks from coming back after first looks.  Now that we have them coming back, they see the changes & how the place has grown and we're delighted at the response.  Let's keep the energy going!

Additionally, tracking this has helped identify some higher-number accounts that're empty but logging in regularly, which indicates potential issues.  Those accounts are being contacted out of order & given special attention.

We appreciate everyone's patience through this process, and it's nice to see how this's helping us to grow & get better!

Any social network I am in if I see someone with no profile pic I do not even click on. It creeps me out honestly. I feel you should be proud of your your work and yourself.

This activity is a great move  no one likes  sites with profiles with dust on them.
how about a way to flag a profile  we encounter  that have not been updated in a while  that would send you a little memo    then you wouldn't have to do all the work yourself.

Thank you for your hard work.

barepixels wrote:

what you need is a module that find members who have not log in since X amount of time and send them a nice "come back"  mail.

Recently Dropbox did that to me.

Something like that's actually in the works. 

Chrissy Daniels wrote:

That would be awesome!

We have a number of improvements coming. 

Models Fotog wrote:

Probably mentioned many times. The accounts that do not have activity create nothing, no activity and are a waste of the active paying or free members time. Those that may have a member or 2 or 11 or 17 in their area only to search,  locate and learn the detail that the search results have rewarded them with " those dormanant members having not signed in 442days ,782 or 1272days or more. Having dead members does nothing for the alive active members.

We're working to address that as well.