My community is nearly 10 years old and we have never felt the need to clear out inactive users (we have a bit over 500K registered accounts and probably an equal number of partially completed one). It is very unlikely for users to come back after extended absence but why close the door when it costs nothing to keep it open? We have had users return after multi-year absences and in one case someone who posted a few times in 2012 without coming back in until 2016 and shortly after was on the shortlist to become a superuser so it can be worth it. Additionally, our user accounts are linked to the customers SSO so blocking access is not something we would consider anyway but I appreciate that is not always the case or a problem for a lot of brands. If you were to go down the path of deletion I would only do so for users who have done nothing. Users who had even contributed a tiny amount I would retain. To your third point around content removal that is a tricky situation and really depends on the intent of your community. My community is a B2C support forum and due to the way our customers use our services it is not unusual for a question asked/answered several years ago to still be relevant. There are some areas where this is absolutely not true and we are working on a plan presently to clean up old content. Importantly we absolutely never delete content for any reason whatsoever. If content is deemed no longer relevant it is moved to a private location, however our future state will likely involve utilising a new archival feature that we have been involved in early access for. As an early insight our clear out will likely take the following form; Archive all content that is older than 12 months and has not had a view in the past six months across all community Archive content older than 12 months that has less than 100 views in high traffic board locations Archive all content older than 12 months regardless of views in very specific support forums (these are related to annual products so last years commentary is rarely, if ever, relevant) As an interim measure we have been blocking users from replying to threads over a certain age (it varies based on the board, typically 90 days) for over a year and this helps keep content fresh as users are more likely to post a new question.
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