Site Question / Help Hosting Question

[gldenwetgoose 21,498]

Just a quick question for @Admin .....    I appreciate the site content of PF must be huge - given the number of picture galleries and threads of discussion dating back over the years.

Does the membership database of users take a lot of space or introduce a processing overhead, given there are 25,000 or so member records to host?

The reason I ask, I sometimes scan over the 'todays birthdays' list, keeping an eye out for any friendly souls. It struck me today that I didn't recognise any names - on mouseover it seems that 80%+ of the names listed were last active in 2014.  So out of the 25,000 membership it could be that less than 5000 have visited in the last couple of years.

I know that showing a large membership on the homepage is attractive, but is in imposing a cost / processing overhead which could be aided by a cull of defunct accounts? 

[Admin 14,791]

Good question, and thanks for looking out for the site. Inactive members take up extremely little space though, the vast majority of space is taken up by the images uploaded.

If necessary, an option could be to remove posts from over 5 years.  There's no need right now, but I'd be curious how much this would bother people. My general feeling is less than 1% of people ever look at threads from that long ago. 

[Sophie 24,412]

1 hour ago, Admin said:

Good question, and thanks for looking out for the site. Inactive members take up extremely little space though, the vast majority of space is taken up by the images uploaded.

If necessary, an option could be to remove posts from over 5 years.  There's no need right now, but I'd be curious how much this would bother people. My general feeling is less than 1% of people ever look at threads from that long ago. 

It would bother me, I consider the old posts to be part of PeeFans history and I enjoy digging through them from time to time. (I was reading a thread from 2014 just yesterday) but maybe I'm part of the 1%

I was part of a forum much larger than this, founded in 2004 and they had a purge in 2009, so many memories and history was lost. For a while it kind of split the community, those who were there before the purge, and the newbies. 

[lovestoseepee 297]

I agree about keeping things as I am with sophie on this and I sometimes look at old stuff too. So you aren't alone in that regard @Sophie

[Admin 14,791]

Certainly wouldn't be something I'd like either, and it isn't something I'd even considered until this topic was brought up. Also, it would only be old picture posts (the ones where the pictures got duplicated during the site software change). Text posts take up very little space, as with inactive users. 

Again, no intention for this to happen, just clarifying that that would be the best way to make space if it did come to that. If enough people continue supporting the site with gold membership, we won't need to. 🙂  But since gold revenue has dropped a lot lately, it's good to have a backup that wouldn't massively affect the site. 

[likesToLick 10,216]

It would be nice if only the duplicate pictures could be removed,  but I understand that is difficult to achieve on the platform that the forum uses.

 I agree with Sophie that it would be a serious loss if we no longer had the early posts.

[gldenwetgoose 21,498]

That's all fair enough - thanks.   I'm also in total agreement with not losing content....   The question was really just around whether it was a technical burden, agree that content outways that.