Storage treasures recently announced that they are well above 500,000 members. That is king size IMHO. The bad part is, out of the half mil there is a miniscule participation rate. Just judging by forum traffic. They may have 500,000 members but the participation rate is very low.
The high numbers are more than likely due to the celebrity factor.
Travis, have you ever considered pruning old accounts that don’t post here? I mean, just like what ROI is to buying storage lockers percentage of participation in a forum is equally important.
Know what I mean?
Yeah, I sure do. From what I have read though, pruning members isn't a good idea. Doing so doesn't benefit the forum at all and can only hurt us. There is always a chance that members who haven't been active for a while will come back. Plus, just because someone doesn't post doesn't mean that they aren't using the forum. We hear the same thing over and over again. Someone will make their first post and it will begin with "I have been reading the forum for several months."
However, I have been vigilant about spam accounts since I took over the forum. I have deleted any new accounts that have zero posts and a link in their signature. Although it's a painstakingly slow process, I have also been going through the member list and deleting any accounts that have zero activity and a link in their signature.
500,000 users is amazing. However, you have to keep in mind how Storage Treasures works. People come to their site looking for storage auctions. When they get there, they see a map with lots of flags which appear to be auctions in their area. The visitor is then forced to provide their name and email address before they can view the auctions. Once they enroll, they realize that those flags are just storage facility locations, not actually auctions. (I consider this bait and switch.) I'm sure a lot of people visit their site once and never return.
Also, keep in mind that Storage Treasures has no spam control in their registration process. Many of the users could have been created by a bot. I could have 200 people a day join this forum if I turned off my spam protection.