Trivial question for mods/admin: number of registered members discrepancy

[U. A.]

Or anyone else who magically has the answer I guess.

So according to the landing page, there are currently 59,798 members as of this writing:



However, according to the user number (or whatever it's properly called) attached to this Latest member's url, they are actually the 119,048th member to register (evidenced by the fact that members who joined in the first months of the site's existence have single- to triple-digit numbers in their urls):





So, how does that work? Does not being active for a period of time remove a user from the total Member count? Does banning/account deactivation achieve this too? Some secret third thing? Where are the unaccounted-for other half of the site's members?
Thank you in advance to anyone who explains this.

 

[-Link-]

I've never been a moderator here, so I couldn't state anything with absolute certainty.

But, I would guess the discrepancy will be related to banned accounts. It may be that a substantial number of accounts are created for purposes of spam posts that get auto-flagged and kept hidden to members and left for moderators to sort through.

There may also be a number of accounts that get auto-banned for being detected as duplicate accounts. This would typically relate to IP address and cookies, but browser or device fingerprinting are possible avenues as well (not necessarily on this forum). Most likely, these auto-bans would only occur when an account is newly created. If an already-active account gets detected as a duplicate account, then typically that account would just be flagged for moderator review rather than auto-banned. It's possible this detection could outright prevent registration from occurring at all (in which case this wouldn't be a thing for new accounts), but that would depend on the capabilities of forum software.

Those numbers attached to everyone's profile URLs will indeed be the chronological order of registrations.

TL;DR -- Most likely answer is spam accounts which would make up the vast majority of the discrepancy.

 

[EternalShore]

I would second Link, especially considering that some accounts don't even have profiles visible anymore or got completely evaporated along with all their threads too (mostly minors and those who lied on the entry form)~ There's also self-bans and all the other types of bans, which could result in it even more so too~ This may also include denied membership requests too, but that one's more doubtable~ However, I will say that it's surprising that about half the accounts who have ever been here are banned~ I checked back for the day when I first joined, and that's the case too~ >_<

 

[Downdraft]

I think it wouldn't make sense to also include banned and deleted accounts in there, thus that's just the active members...