Inactive Users

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As the number of registered users in StocksCafe continue to increase, there are bound to be users who have registered but stopped using StocksCafe. Currently, I continue to update their portfolio and even send them the daily market update emails (if they have set it up that way).

However, this is bad for everyone. For the inactive users, the daily market update emails are likely deemed as spam. For StocksCafe, computing resources are wasted. For current active users, it means less computing resources are spent on them leading to slower response, delayed updates, and later daily market update emails.

Therefore, going forward, auto-updates will be gradually turned off for users who have not visited StocksCafe in a while. Of course, features will be turned back on once they visit StocksCafe again. Note however that as most updates take time to compute and they are set to run at regular intervals, it can take up to 24 hours before all features are updated after you come back.

Users who have not visited for the last 15 days
– iAssist update will be turned off
– Portfolio Report update will be turned off

Users who have not visited for the last 90 days
– Market Update emails will no longer be sent
– Dividends Collected update will be turned off
– Portfolio update will be turned off
– Portfolio will not be shared even if it was previously shared

More might be added in future.

Note: All of the above does not affect Friends of StocksCafe. As long as you are a Friend of StocksCafe, everything would be updated for you regardless of when you last visited StocksCafe.

Happy investing!

16 Comments

Leave a Reply to martinlam Cancel reply

  • What sorcery is this to login once every 30 days? I think I quite look forward to the daily end of day portfolio update actually.

    I feel stupid having to login just to keep the account alive when u can use email tracker to determine user activities

  • I think is a good idea to turn off some updates for the inactive users, but 7 days is too short.
    May I suggest 14 days instead ?

  • @aldraylow
    “I feel stupid having to login just to keep the account alive when u can use email tracker to determine user activities” => This is a reasonable suggestion but it is dependent on the email provider and individual’s settings. Also, this is more of a resource allocation problem where priority is given to users who visit regularly.

    @hanneng
    “May I suggest 14 days instead?” => Good point. I will change it to 15 days shortly.

  • It’s just a suggestion, the current email on portfolio updates is very useful.

    I noticed that your email generated for per user portfoiloo is not using “plaintext”, looks to me like either HTML or Rich text since bold, underline,colors markup are used. The email generation is already resource intensive, no harm include a Img tracker?

    Since each user email is generated uniquely, possible to embed an img url with unique identifier, so that the loading of img request to your server will indicate that the user is actively reading your email.

  • I think it’s impt to track your readership for emails as well as web pages access.

  • Maybe email is no longer an ideal tool for messages delivery, at least not for all messages. Using mobile phone app to do so is the way to go?

  • @aldraylow
    Yes, all emails StocksCafe sent currently already uses image ping. You can see it if you choose to display the original message (i.e. in its original HTML). Although image ping can easily be blocked by email providers or via users’ settings, it does give an estimation of email open rate. The accuracy further improves if you combine it with clicks in the email to account for users that block image ping.

    So, yes, I can know for some users, if the image ping is not blocked, that they did open StocksCafe emails. I would not conclude that they are actively reading the emails though because 1) if a user is did not visit StocksCafe for a long time, their portfolio would presumably be outdated? 2) if the contents are interesting to them, wont they be clicking the links in there?

    @martinlam
    That is an interesting idea. However, not every StocksCafe user has downloaded its app. Hence, the reach might be limited.

  • Hi Evan,

    My 2 cents worth for your consideration to eliminate inactive users,

    1) After X days (15 or ?) that Stock.Cafe system detected no login from a user, system sent email with subject eg “Login to Stock.Cafe expiring – action required’ to user with content to inform user to click a link if they want to continue accessing Stock/Cafe

    This helps those users whose portfolio may not change over long periods and they just want to monitor via the daily portfolio emails that received.

    2) If no action from user for above email, system stop sending daily portfolio updates thereon.

    3) After X+n days (30 or ?), remove account.
    (Mention this in Stocks/Cafe terms of account usage)

    It is fair that Stocks.Cafe remove inactive account(s), especially it will hoard disk storage and waste server processing unused portfolios.

    Cheers.

    .

  • Hi Jcncafe,

    Thank you for your detailed suggestion! I really love the idea of reminding users!

    “This helps those users whose portfolio may not change over long periods and they just want to monitor via the daily portfolio emails that received.” => I guess it is important to cater to different type of users.

    “After X+n days (30 or ?), remove account. ” => Removing account is a bit too extreme. Hard disk space is cheap. It is the CPU time that is costly both in terms of money and time to other users.

    In view of this, I have change it now to 90 days before users are deemed inactive and once they have not login for >80 days then in the the market update email. I will insert a notice right at the start of the email that their account will become inactive and stop receiving this market update email if an account is inactive for >90 days.

    Do you think this is sufficient? Trying to tie things to current workflow to keep it simple and easy for me 🙂

    Cheers,
    Evan

  • Hey Evan,

    If your latest change will immediately weed out those who have not login>90 days already, that should rip benefits of not having to CPU process these inactive users portfolios.

    Suppose you have (or can install) a CPU performance monitor to watch trend. Stocks.Cafe user base will continue to grow. You will know if CPU threshold breached during daily process.

    Keep simple is great.

    Cheerios!

  • @Jcncafe Yes. I know when users last login 🙂

    Yes, I do quite a bit of monitoring and alerts on a variety of metrics.

    @Mithuprem Thanks!

  • I agree with the principle of the idea.

    Just need to set the time period for expiry. In addition, you can consider to add an email function to send final reminder at point of expiry to ‘click continue’. If no response in 3 days, then just close account. For those who are Friends (contributed), appreciate if they could be excluded from expiry.

    If people really appreciate this, they will either re-register or use regularly. There is no free lunch.

    PS: U might not want to let them recreate the same ID as a security measure though.

  • @thevaluefund Thanks for the suggestion

    “then just close account” => No need to close account though. Keeping them inactive would mean they only take up a bit of hard disk space which is cheap and does not really affect the operation of the website.

    “For those who are Friends (contributed), appreciate if they could be excluded from expiry.” => Yes, Friends of StocksCafe will always be active account for as long as they are a Friend. I will be releasing an article shortly to Friends of StocksCafe on how they can be Friends of StocksCafe for as long as this website is around (which I hope will be a long long time) without having to contribute monetarily directly.

    “There is no free lunch.” => Yup. Friends of StocksCafe and me are mostly paying for it 🙂

  • @evankoh – U have my support for an annual contribution to stockcafe in advance. Tks. 🙂

Evan Koh

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