Question about the number of registered users...

[Sinclair]

At the bottom of the forums page it says there are 1959 registered users, yet when I click on the name of the newest registered user, gerhard, it says that he/she is member number 2165. What's with the difference of 206?

 

[Jade Jaguar]

My guess is that the 206 are no longer active, and were dropped. Member number 2165 means that 2164 had registered before.

 

[Sinclair]

I'd thought about that, but it seems to me that there would be a lot more registered users that are no longer, or ever were, active. You're probably right though.

 

[AntonyF]

Jade is right. There's been some database cleansing... plus just general removals, test accounts etc. I will be purging more in the future.

 

[sleepy_shadow]

Re: Question about the number of registered users.

Since the board is database-driven, I assume the member ID is the primary key of some table describing members -- unique and automatically incremented upon each addition.

Generally in databases, when records are removed, key fields cannot be changed to reflect this -- because they establish relations between tables, their reshuffling would be an inefficient and needlessly risky operation.

 

[AntonyF]

Re: Question about the number of registered users.

Yep, Sleepy knows it.

Plus, even when deleted, there are still remnants. For example posts from a deleted member will still have their record ID attached to it.