User account cleanup

The old site was getting spammed pretty badly with bots signing up for accounts and using the profile pages for advertising unsavoury things, such as this. Hundreds (thousands?) more can be found by looking through the memberlist.

There were also a vast number of spam private messages in the database originating from such accounts.

The new site will hopefully address this problem by using CAPTCHA on the registration page and only allowing logged in members to view member profiles.

However I am wondering if it might be a good idea to prune these accounts and any other inactive accounts. This would be accounts with 0 posts, downloads, articles or maps.

The only danger may possibly be to non-posting lurkers of which I can't imagine there are very many (if any at all).

Would anyone have any issues if I were to go ahead with this?

Most of what you say sounds good, except for one thing:

larchy said:
The new site will [...] only allowing logged in members to view member profiles.

This is a bad idea since a lot of mappers use their profile here as their mapping "homepage". I know I did for a while before I made a website.

Hmm well yes, thats the downside. Unfortunately there isn't much choice if the site is being used as a big spam link farm.

CAPTCHA is far from perfect but should, I hope, help considerably... which would remove the need to keep profiles inaccessible to non-members. Will have to see how it goes.

I was thinking of maybe developing user profiles a bit since, as you say, some ppl like to use them as their mapping portfolios.

Something along the lines of adding tabs to the profile page that would show a gallery of a user's maps/downloads etc, sprucing up the current profile page design and maybe adding something like a "featured items" section that a user could choose to display.

A 'favourites' list might be good as well, a system so user's could add a map/article etc as a 'fav' and the resulting list could be added to the profiles. Would also give people another way of sorting through the site content in addition to the current rating system.

Of course the new site is officially 'done' now other than bug-squashing, so stuff like that would be a spare-time project for me. I wouldn't mind looking at developing something along those lines though if ppl thought it might be useful?