Makes no difference to me, why people come and go.

I wouldnt want to try to run my own site, even if i had the $$$ to hire someone to do it right, much less try to figure out how to do it myself. I find it very perplexing that admin wanted to do this and has kept at it, i find it even stranger that someone else would be interested in managing admins job.

I suspect if groups were dropped, active membership would go down. Many utilize the groups to avoid the hatefulness and negativity so prevalent elsewhere.

If one does not care for the groups, don't participate in them. Seems pretty petty to demand that others give them up if some nonparticipant does not care for them.

The Dating Thing
IMO this works much, much better that the profile mining sites. It's not nearly as fast because everyone actually need to put effort in for it to work. Calling this a dating site is a slight misnomer, it's more like a bar where everyone has a little sign on thier forehead stating availability and what they want, if you are too.

.Too Many Groups
Way, way way to many groups. Get rid of 90% of them. Sex and politics should be the extent of groups - keep the things best left behind closed doors behind closed doors.

Age
To many geezers here. We'll eventually die off though, so there's hope. One other thing, and that's the women here seem to get blasted by the desperate guys PM's. Giving layers to the block function could help.

Inactive Member Deletion
Put a filter in profiles to only show members that have been active in the last X amount of time.

Get rid of the self appointed lynch mobs policing the membership
Seriously, admin needs to take control of the site and do the policing. Members doing it harass new people that don't meet the lynch mobs, not the sites, standards. It give the impression that no one who owns the site cares about what goes on here. Add in the levels confusion some new members have and it would be easy for them to think this place is like a high school cafeteria they're freshmen, and you need to find the table your accepted at before the kids in ther letterman jackets (higher levels) start bullying you.

I'm not trying to fight with you, Sarge, but I am still sort of missing your angle here.

My understanding is that this site originated as a dating site. But like all gatherings of minds, the population determines the future usability. So, that's your suggestions #1 and #3, and somewhat #2 explained.

Your fourth suggestion, well, that may be far more work than is worth doing. Databases are large tricky things, with a lot going on 'under the hood', as they say. Starting to scrub can lead to all sorts of problems. Would you be willing to trade an app that does its job, but has wonky counts for an app that has a scaled down lean database, but breaks all the time because of void function calls and orphaned records?

I'm not trying to be a shitty-kitty here - but having some tech under my furry belt, I tend to go with the "if it ain't broke..." approach.

Perhaps archive accounts that have not been used for a year, yet allow the owner to recover the account.

Dating. Don't have an opinion. I asked what was the point of it once, and was told that we have had several marriages !

Groups. Yes there are a lot and I think it should be made harder to start new ones, but I can not see that they put members of, and remember that if you do get the numbers of active members to grow then there may come a day when there are too few, they could even be a reason why some people stay.

Age. Maybe the site is only for older people, because younger people simply take none religion for granted and don't see a need to talk about it, or think that religion/none religion is not important any more. Perhaps wishful thinking on my part.

Inactive members deletion. Good idea, although they don't actually cost us anything, so not that important. But I would make it longer than a year, perhaps two. And send out a warning notice such as. 'If you do not log on in the next month.' The reason for that is. Supposing you have been very ill and have just spent a year in intensive care, you recover and try to go back to your life, then find that your account is gone and you have to start over. Or perhaps at least a way to reactivate old accounts.

Dating - I think because we don't have as many members as other dating sites - it makes it a challenge.
It's up to people whether they stay for all the other features. As long as the site keeps growing there is hope.

Groups - I disagree with you here. I think with over 1000 groups on site there are way too many topics to group under a few headers. Some are really specific.
I do think one way to cut back on the plethora of groups is to encourage some group merges.
I'll add how to do that to this post - shortly. (see end of this post).

I've had that happen in two groups I moderate to very good effect. You just have to have like minded hosts and one willing to give over the main controls.
There will always be folks who get disgusted with how someone runs their group. So there will always be spin off groups.

Age - I'm actually seeing some younger folks coming in and sticking around. Might be some new advertising or that we now have a solid core of younger members - I'm not sure?
But I do review who comes in every day for "Watchers" so I get a sense of how old and young the new members are.
Some are just really relieved to have a place to call "Not religion land". I have to say we are always truly delighted (us old foggies) by seeing younger folk come in. We do our best - for the most part - to get them to stay.

Inactive Member Deletion - Agreed. Though frankly as this site actually removes scammers - unlike most other dating sites - I'm fairly content with artificial inflation of numbers.
People can browse profiles to see if that member near them is active or not. (It's there in the bio). But it is discouraging to browse members and see how many haven't been active in forever and a day. It would be nice to get accurate representation.

I do think a year is a great suggestion though. If they decide to return they can just create a new account then.

These are the instructions for a Group Merge: " How to merge groups."