Fiona, please do not post my private messages here in a public forum. That was a discussion between you and I, and I don't appreciate seeing it copied and pasted here in SYM.
Fiona wrote:However it occurs to me that advertising revenue may be related to claimed membership and that this might have financial implications. Of course the size of the membership may be entirely irrelevant to whether advertisers choose to place adverts here; and the fees may not vary with the size of the board. But it worries me. I would like to have your assurance that the size of the membership has no financial effect at all, and if you can do that I am content to leave quietly. Otherwise I must insist since I would not like to be party to any financial impropriety
The deletion of an account has absolutely nothing to do with advertising revenue. To be perfectly honest, most advertisers don't even like forum traffic. At one point in time, I even had to prove that the number of pageviews from our content pages was far greater than the number our forums generated. There's even a ratio that some advertisers want to see, but now that we're with UGO, it really doesn't matter anymore.
The reason for keeping your account active is explained in my PM. Removing a member's account reverts any and all correpondence they've ever had to a generic "Guest" ID, which in turn causes a variety of annoying problems for me (and anyone else who might be referencing or quoting your old posts). It also means that the database has to be run through a few server-intensive maintenance queries that track down and update all your old posts. There have been a few people who have requested this over the years, and I've turned them all down for the same reason.
If you no longer want to post here, I can only suggest that you don't point your browser to this forum. That's the only advice I can really give.
