JowettTalk User Register and your email address

[Forumadmin]

I am currently updating the JowettTalk user register. I will be contacting everybody and if I get an undelivered message to the email address registered on JowettTalk then I will be suspending the account. . Note the suspension will be temporary and nothing will be deleted or lost.

Please make sure the email address with which you are registered is one you are currently using. You should also check it matches that in the club register if you want to be recognised as a club member to access the library. You can change your email address in your User Control Panel , Profile, Edit Account Settings. Click on the arrow beside your username in the top right to access your User Control Panel.

If you update your email address in your profile, you will be deactivated from the forum. A new activation e-mail will be sent to the new e-mail address, and when you click the link in that e-mail, the account will be reactivated.

This is to improve security on the site and to aid better communication between users. When users send you a Private Message PM , normally you would get an email as well, although you can change this in your notification settings.

If you think your account has been suspended then please contact Keith Clements or Forumadmin or the jowett.net Webmaster . Use the Contact page on jowett.net

[Forumadmin]

I have run a test program on the 728 email addresses with which people are registered. This test uses 4 probes to see if the email address used can be reached. Some mail servers block such probes so the tests are not as good as sending somebody a request to reply. However, in many cases it is clear that such a request would not get through and would come back as an undeliverable email. Even if such a request did get through there is a chance the mailbox it lands in is not read or the request goes in their spam box or that they do not bother to respond.

Anyway the result of this test was that only 289 users had a mailbox that my test thought could be reached. 54 of the user's addresses did not get tested but 439 did come back with errors.

569 ended up in a JowettTalk group I called BadEmails that I set up. The numbers do not quite add up so I am running the test again.

The recent set of emails I sent out to those who had never posted and to those who have not logged on also generated many undeliverable emails. So I will need to reconcile those with the results of the above test.

When I receive the club registers for this year I will check to see which JT users have their email address in a club register. Then the JT Club members group will be updated, so you might lose access to the Library and other club only areas if the email addresses are not equivalent.

Once that is done I will then start pruning the registered user list and suspend or delete any accounts no longer thought to be used. I do realise that some make very sporadic use of the site or only read the public parts of JowettTalk or never get around to sharing anything by posting something. But It is obvious that over 13 years the site has accumulated many accounts and there are accounts which will be never used again. Indeed some of the response I have received recently have enabled me to deactivate or delete accounts of those who say they no longer require the account. This is usually because they wanted some contact or had something to sell.

Currently there are 728 registered users, 418 users have never posted, 365 have posted less than 3 times, 534 have not logged on in the last 100 days, 597 have not logged on in the last year. On the positive side, 131 have logged on in the last year and 43 people have posted more than 100 times.

I propose to delete the accounts that have not been logged into for one year and have never posted. This will currently affect 360 users. This proposal preserves those that have registered within the last year but have not posted.

Those that have have not logged on for over a year but have posted something in the past will have their accounts deactivated and will need to contact me to have them reactivated. This affects a further 72 users.

If those accounts are for club members I will try to contact them before deleting or deactivating; although that becomes difficult if the email addresses do not match or the username is a pseudonym.

[Forumadmin]

The live system has now had the User Group table updated from the latest membership lists. So the UK members that have not renewed have been removed from their club group. The NZ, AUS and JOAC groups will be updated in due course for those that have not renewed for 2019.

An email has been constructed manually and individually sent to each user that is a club member that has not logged on for a long time to encourage them to come back.


Today I wrote a program to process the latest membership lists that I have.
The program used the registered email addresses of the users in Jowett Talk to see if they were in any of the lists of the current paid up membership of the 4 clubs. The program then adjusts the individual club groups and the 'club members' group in JowettTalk.
These were the results done on the test system that is a back up from a couple of weeks ago. Since then we gained many more registered users. There are now 779.

JCCAUS 26 2018 members
JCCNZ 25 2018 and 2019 members
JCCUK 173 2019 members
JOAC 46 2018 members
Some members may get around to paying their 2019 subs eventually, but soon they will not have access to the Club pages of JowettTalk. There will also be a delay in them being reinstated.

This gave a total of 218 Club Members who have registered on JowettTalk, since some are in more than one club. Note there are a few I know are members that either have not put their email address in the club register or it is different.

Of the 728 Jowett Talk users
Elite Poster 43 have posted more than 100 times
Gone Away 535 have not signed on for 100 days.

[Forumadmin]

Some people have managed to register twice, usually because they changed their email address. Rather than login and change it in their account settings, they opened a new account. This now causes a problem , particularly if they have posted using the new account.
Luckily I can run 5 MYSQL queries on the database to move posts from the new user back to the old user. I first have to find the old and new usernames and their corresponding user ids. I also have to resynchronise the site statistics and posts counts in the Administrators Control Panel afterwards.

So please own up if you have done this so that I can find your old and new usernames more easily. Please also tell me your previous email addresses.
In this way you will be credited with all the posts you have made. Soon I will be deleting the old unused accounts after which this process cannot be done.
There is a security risk if old accounts with defunct emails are left, as it is feasible that an old domain could be resurrected and an email account set up to masquerade as you. Note this does not only apply to JowettTalk.