I think I agree with Boccaccio. It's not that to remove users is hard. It's quite easy, actually, and shouldn't take more than a couple minutes because the function is included in the forums scripts. But I seldom used it and I never do any mass removal of users.

I don't like the idea to remove a user unless it's a must (one example is removal of the underage users). First, it's not necessary at all. It doesn't cost anything for a user to keep his/her account. And I won't use his/her email to send spam messages or sell it. And it's not very uncommon that a user comes back to this site / forums after 6 months or 1 year. And do we really want to force users to post messages here by threatening the cancellation of their accounts? I don't think so. And I don't think they can be threatened by that. We should encourage them to stay by some other ways.

Thank you for your concern about the hard disk space and the memory usage. But that's not the most costy part. The most expensive part of a site is the traffic. You might have only one small file and use only a very small fraction of disk space. But if there are tons of people download it, the cost is still high. If no one reads the old threads of this forum, it will cost nothing (well, almost) to keep them there. And this forum is still far, far from being called "big". Several thousands users are not that many for the server. The database can handle millions records.

If you really want to get a more accurate number about active users, you can use the "advanced search" link in the member list page. You can specify the join time, post number, last post date etc. to search for members. Here is the link:
http://www.bdsmlibrary.com/forums/me...?action=search
I think the search function will be able to give the info you want.

Jinn