Hi fellow X Marks members,
This forum uses email addresses to notify members of a lot of different things. Three of the most important are notices when someone responds to a thread you have subscribed to, notifications when you have received a new Personal Message (PM), and the annual message sent on the anniversary of your joining the forum.
I use the annual anniversary message to weed out those members who are no longer active.
Recently I have been getting a lot of error messages about members who have not updated their email address. Each time I get one of these error messages I have tried to let the member know with a gentle reminder. Perhaps you have seen the "Oops, it seems this member needs to update their email address" message posted under some members username.
We now have 47 active members (have logged on and made at least one post within the last year) who have been on the "invalid email address" list for over a year and an additional 39 who have been on the list for between 1 and 2 years.
I can fully understand that someone may change their email address or have an old address go inactive and forget to update their profile here on X Marks. But a lot of the background operation of this forum is based on email messages. So having a valid email address in your profile if very important.
(I hope that the members here have noticed that they have never been spammed via email that came from this forum. I spend a lot of time and energy keeping the spammers at bay and protecting your personal information.)
Among the email error message I received just this morning, 5 were from members who have already have the "Oops" message for over a year. Three of these were caused by email inboxes over their quota. People don't even clear out their inboxes or clear old PM's. We currently have just under 100 members with PM inboxes over 95% full.
It has become clear that a few members are simply ignoring the "Oops" message for some reason or other. In the end though this is causing me a lot of extra and unnecessary work and expense.
These error messages are eating up a significant amount of band width and slowing down the forum. If you have been around the internet for a while you know that it is run on volume of bandwidth. We are charged by the total amount of bandwidth we use. I have been informed by our hosting company that due to the very large bandwidth requirement of this large and active forum the cost of operating X Marks will increase significantly when I renew the contract in a few months.
So, today I cut off anyone in the "Invalid Email Address" group from posting to the forum. They can see and read everything, they just can't start new threads or reply to threads.
I am posting this notice to keep everyone informed about my actions and sincere hope that this action will wake people up to the amount of extra expense this is going to cause their fellow members.
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