Why would the number of all time sign-ups ever decrease?

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AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around the possibility of the number of all-time sign-ups decreasing. rogerdean initially raises the question, citing instances where the number has decreased as reported on the About page. Several users offer explanations, including Moin who suggests it might be due to the automatic clean-up of inactive users, while MikeNolan proposes that sign-up counts might include those who were invited but never responded. not-ethan mentions that users can delete their own accounts, and moderators can do the same.

Falco provides insight into the issue, explaining that the “Sign-Ups” metric on the About page is actually a user count, which was previously called “Users” but was renamed in a recent update. This count does not track sign-ups directly but rather serves as a proxy, removing users who are deleted or never activated their accounts.

1

Hi folks. I’ve seen this a couple of times this week alone, as reported on the About page. Why could this be?
Thanks in advance

2

Maybe it is because of the automatic clean up of inactive users. By default users who did not reach trust level 1 (so very short reading time) and never posted anything are deleted after two years.
You can modify that with the clean up inactive users after days setting.

3

Interesting, thanks. That setting is the default 730 days, but my community has only been running for 2 months…

4

Could sign-up counts include those who were invited but never responded to the invitation?

5

Hi Mike. I think that’d be kinda counter-intuitive but would be on the right sort of scale for what I’ve observed with my numbers…

6

Users can delete their accounts if their account is still young and does not have a lot of posts. Moderators can do the same to any user.

7

Sign-Ups on the About pages is a User count. That used to be called, correctly, “Users” but was renamed recently to “Sign-Ups” in

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/19020

As a simple User count, it doesn’t really track Sign-Ups, but counts the number of Users in a site as a proxy to the Sign-Ups, meaning that users who are deleted, never activated via the email link, etc are removed from the count.