Sandy,

Is it possible (and easy enough) to have a column for "Date of Last Post" in the Member list? just a thought...

_pink

Good Idea.

I would also suggest that if you don't post a message within a year of your last post that an email be sent (or PM) saying your name will be removed from the member list. All posts would stay and their user Id next to the post would say "no longer a current member. This would clear up some of the "test" and "fake" user names and those such as Ukrainelady that posted the message that was removed and she was never heard from again.

The only problem I see would be if they are removed from the list and then rejoin and want the same username and reinstate their total number of posts. However, if they get a message with the warning that they have to make a post within the next 30 days to keep their post count and don't do it. Then they are out of luck.


Any other thoughts on this?

Good idea _pink.

Andreas

I don't like the idea to remove members who havn't post a message for a year, because I could be one of them
On the other side I log in almost every day looking for news. So if you want to have a 'clear' memberlist I suggest to remove ppl who havn't logged in for a year or so. Also I would suggest to mention the last login date instead of the last post.
With this information I would be able to see if a private message makes sense or not.

As usal I may be wrong

Cya,
Markus

I'd like to support the idea of the last login date/time stamp. I've been thinking of that myself, but Markus came forward with this idea before me!

Maybe a "Last Activity" column with a note as to if it were a "log-in" or "post" etc...?

_pink

I like your idea Markus. As long as people log in once a year, they are considered active. They do not need to leave a post. Otherwise, lets purge those who are not active. It is probably not a big deal with approx. 150 members, but if the site grows 500+, it wouldn't be a bad idea to clean up the memberlist.

All that I have to say on this topic is that I like both _pink and Markus idea very much!!!!!!

Okay, lots of stuff here.

First off, there is already a field in the database called lastvist. This stores the most recent time the user loaded a forum page while logged in. It wouldn't be too hard to use this field either in the Memberlist or on each individual's member page.

Furthermore, it wouldn't be too hard to filter the Memberlist to exclude users who have no logged in for more than a year or whatever other length we may want.

Next, quering the database for each user to find out when they last posted a message is fairly simple, but probably isn't something you want to do on the member page since it would require an extra database call for every user (or some convoluted parsing of a single statement as the page is drawn up).

Tracking the last action a user made would be a little more difficult since this is currently not in the database, but again, with a suitably complicated SQL statement, it could be done without too much trouble.

Now, the question is how many of these things do we really want, and where do we want them? There isn't much space on the Memberlist page. Do we have room for another column there? The alternative location is each individual member's page.

More opinions please!

Sandy

In my opinion, date/time of the latest visit on the individual user's page should be just enough. (I don't like the words "last visit", as in most cases it's definitely not the last! )

Here is my two cents.

Don't change anything on the memberlist page. You can tell my the total number of posts who is actively contributing to the site.

Under each members profile there is already a link that allows you to find all the posts by that member. Click on that and you can see when their last post was. I think all that needs to be added to the member's profile is date of last visit. If you want to add the time, you could do that too, but I think date is sufficient. Some people may want a little privacy so date under member's profile would require a person to click on the members name instead of having it easily viewable on the memberlist page.

I still like the idea of purging people who have been inactive for a year or have logged in less than 25 times in the past year. Some people may just check out the site and never come back. However, if someone was active for many years, left 100's of posts and for some reason, now is inactive. I think they should get at least a few notices before being purged. Maxwiz comes to mind. He just dissappeared. If he doesn't want his membership info cleared, he needs to have time to respond.

I don't think we need to track the last action that a user made. I think people should freely be able to use the site without being tracked everywhere they go or every puzzle they look at on the database, or where they last were before leaving the site.

Lastly, I think it still would be a good feature to be able to look at a picture in the database and then have the ability to search member collections to see if anyone has it in their site. Of course, this would not currently work for my collection. Maybe someday I will put it all on this site.

Thanks for all the work on this site Sandy.

Well, since most people are automatically logged in when they visit, you'll be logging in quite often (maybe you only actually log in if you've been gone for 5 minutes), but unless you post and leave, you'll almost never has a "last post".