deleting useless users

rgg, with all the respect, don't you think it is a bit too harsh to label someone as a 'useless member' and delete them from a site if they did not contribute/log in for a month. Maybe if the did not use it in couple of years and never were active...It doesn't hurt anyone that someone has a profile here and did not use it in a month. People register and go on vacations, or have other stuff to do. Would be quite annoying for them to come back and see their profile is gone, even if they did not put much in it.

Moderators have to deal with a lot here. And people that are here to advertise ONLY should be deleted. Guide that is advertising his service, and guide that contributes useful information which advertises his service in the process are two different things. I do not think anyone has a problem with second of these. Guides deserve respect and should be treated with such (as long as they follow basic rules).

If a guide has contributions, whether it be pages or good content in the forums that people can use, I think they should be able to advertise as much as they want on their profile page, as long as it is confined there. It isn't obtrusive.

Vitaliy M. wrote:

deleting useless users

rgg, with all the respect, don't you think it is a bit too harsh to label someone as a 'useless member' and delete them from a site if they did not contribute/log in for a month. Maybe if the did not use it in couple of years and never were active...It doesn't hurt anyone that someone has a profile here and did not use it in a month. People register and go on vacations, or have other stuff to do. Would be quite annoying for them to come back and see their profile is gone, even if they did not put much in it.

I didn't quite say "did not contribute/log in for a month", that would of course be totally wrong. I labeled useless members as

rgg wrote:... users that have no other contributions than perhaps one profile image, have no forum posts and have not been logged on for more than, say, one month or one week

I didn't put a time constraint on having a contribution or forum post. Anybody with at least one forum post or one other contribution than the profile image would not be deleted automatically, no matter how old that message or contribution would be. You can safely go climb for a couple of months and your profile will still be there. However, if you sign up as a new member, don't post anything and, at some point, stop logging in, what's the point of keeping the account alive anyway?
On the plus side, automatically deleting such members saves the Elves from doing it manually and it keeps the size of the user database in check.

I didn't quite say "did not contribute/log in for a month"

users that have no other contributions than perhaps one profile image, have no forum posts and have not been logged on for more than, say, one month or one week

Only 'no forum posts' are missing from being listed above. But I guess you are right, these members are not that important. Up to the elves...

Fixed. Thanks to those involved for the calm talk behind the scenes. A good day.

Guides are OK from the moment they join SP to play the game.
Tomek Lodowy for example is a guide. All his recent pics contain the URL to his page but we are all aware of the quality of his contribution on SP. In my opinion this does the best possible advert for a guide, million times better than spam-pages posted by people like this one :
http://www.summitpost.org/users/asiantreks/77141