Currently, a member who lapses can restart their membership, but they are considered a new member by Member Saved searches and on the webpage gadgets. There are several methods to exclude previous-but-Lapsed members from being reported as net new members. It can be done in a Contacts search, but not a Member one. Therefore, our members get confused when they see the webpage gadget report their friends as new joiners. The selected solution needs to be implemented in a Member Saved search, in the webpage gadget, and perhaps any dashboard reporting on member growth.

Did you know that members who have set to Lapsed and subsequently come back are filling in a new member application, therefore are considered brand new members. Then, the membership saved search will list lapsed as new. Same thing for the webpage gadget when it uses that inaccurate saved search. There is a way to get 'pure' new members using a Contact saved search, but you can't display that on a webpage.
Disappointing, given the prime goal of most websites is to attract the new.

If there was a way to set a determined length of time to when a lapsed member would be archived. One more action could be added to the 'renewal reminders and actions' that would be 'when a member has been lapsed for ??? days, set the member to 'archived.'

This would be useful as there are discounts available for longstanding members, not those who opt in and out of membership every few years but where they still show up as continuous membership.

We sometimes have to perform annual reconciliations of user accounts. Having such a feature would be of great use to us

I like this idea. It would be helpful to know when we need to issue new membership cards (with an updated expiry date). I ended up adding a field to memberships to track when a membership card was last issued. That in tandem with a notification would be helpful to identify when/to whom we need to issue new membership cards.