Yeah David, that's a tough one. We can check the frequency of each user's visits and prune the ones who have not returned after signing on. But then, maybe they're just having a bad year or something? I don't feel good about "pruning" the roster, though.
On the old MSN sites it used to be that a site's ranking on the activity list was determined by the ratio between the total number of members and the total message posts. That caused a lot of managers to prune the member list often. We didn't bother to do that on the old MSN CB site, and it was still #1 every day of every week for over a year straight. Here, none of that stuff matters, anyhow, mainly because there is not the perceived competition and also because this forum gets more message posts most days than the top MSN boating sites get in a week.
There were (are) however, 68 banned spammers on the old CB site, and I think zero on here (unless this last guy comes back). I think all the banned members over there were the nasty folks, who have a rightful place in the world, I guess, but not where my youngsters are often going. Not much risqué stuff in this Pub, though.
Probably the biggest and most harmless pruning can be done for the duplicate users. A lot of folks have signed on and either forgotten their password or wanted to change their username, so then signed on again with a different but very similar username. That is no big deal, but we really appreciate when we hear via PM that they wish to remove the duplicated username. There are as many as a dozen of those on the list, most of whom have posted under one name and not under the other.
Anyone can look at the memberlist and sort by total posts, and then find how many have posted at least one message. The really amazing thing about this place is that it is always in the 40% to 50% range of participation. That is phenomenal for a public forum with the popularity of this one (at least in my mind, having only the MSN sites to compare to).
As for dropping legit users who have never posted, my C-Brat mentality will not allow me to do it. Those folks joined for a reason, and that reason could very well be as good as the one I joined for. Maybe they are just a little more bashful than me. (Like PatA - he's still a few hundred posts from the pinnacle).
And what about Chivita Dave? He was absent for a long time, and now we find it was because he was busy moving his family to Alaska where he got a job managing a new hotel with its own private marina up on some big famous body of water up there. I would be more likely to ban his butt out of jealousy than for so long a period of nonparticipation.
I can say this, though. The number of page hits this place gets compared to the number of registered users is amazingly high. I think the registered users create a small fraction of the actual site traffic. They can't be doing a big portion of it, because there aren't enough fingers on the memberlist to click that many mouses!