Drop in number of members
Written by amnesiac84 8 years agoThose who closely follow our statistics page might have seen a sudden drop in the number of (new) members. You might wonder how the amount of new daily members can be a negative number: it's the sum of all who've joined and who's membership has been suspended or removed.
Every year BeWelcome sends out an e-mail to all who've not logged in for over a year. These members are asked to login once more to show they're still interested. By not logging in, the status is changed to 'inactive', and those members will not show up in the default search results. They can still be found and are not removed or suspended.
We recently found out that the members who confirmed their e-mail address, but never signed in, were excluded from these yearly login reminders. Totalling almost 2,300 members had a completely empty profile and never logged in, not contacted our support team to help them log in. That's why the BoD recently decided to suspend those profiles, since it's very unlikely any of them would be active at some time. If they want to become active again, they can do so by contacting us.
De facto, it means we have 2,300 profiles less in our member list. Although we are a bit sad to see our number sink, it means that there's a higher change finding real members who've at least logged in and showed interest in our hospitality exchange at one point. Quality above quantity!
We hope we will gain another 2,300 members soon again.
Behind the scenes, many volunteers work hard to enable rich encounters between members. For example, they welcome new members, they answer questions from our members, they make sure the servers and website are working, they remove fake spam accounts, they work on the new website, they translate texts in over 20 different languages and they do a lot more!