Poaching is a serious breach protocol and absolutely runs counter to golf's code of honor. It's not about justifying the conduct -- that can be done -- it's about respecting golf's historic commitment to respect, courtesy, and deference. If you want cut throat, watch and play UFC.
Yet some owners depend on it and have no shame about it. I recently kept tabs on one club owner who love to poach members. He got called on out on his page by players, who already belong to one club or another, that he attempted to poach. Yet, he still poaches. He even erases these comments from his page -- I saw several such comments before he scrubbed them off the page -- and then continues to poach.
His sales pitch seems to be "Are you bored with your club, come here. Fair enough if a member is bored and wants to leave a club - happens all the time - but to have that as CC sales pitch is sad.
I find my members three ways:
1) WGT tournament leaderboards. You can sort by CC and the players with no CC affiliation are grouped together at the end. You can then see all non-affiliated players in a list. And you know they are active. This is #1 course
2) The player directory. There, I sort by country and tier
3) Incoming requests from players.
About pending invites, WGT needs to devise a system to make it easier for owners to delete invitations. It takes multiple clicks per player. And that may not sound like a lot but club owners, the good ones, invest a great deal of time on administrative and member relations issues. The bigger the club, the bigger the commitment. It'd be a great if invites automatically expired after a week or some such.