IMPORTANT - User Account Pruning (deletion)

What do you want to see here? Some more categories, forums, and mods? Hmm...
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Tank Program
Forum & Project Admin, PhD
Posts: 6711
Joined: Thu Dec 18, 2003 7:03 pm

IMPORTANT - User Account Pruning (deletion)

Post by Tank Program »

For clarification regarding forum user account pruning, the forums get several hundred of spam user account registrations yearly. Most of these accounts never make a post that passes new user post moderation, but they stay in the database with spam user profiles. I really don't like this as these profiles can be 'dubious' at best and the forums lean more towards 'family friendly'. I have been previously silently deactivating these accounts and deleting them at roughly yearly intervals. Unfortunately an actively used account was deleted in the latest batch of pruning. Apologies to thxmp, and anyone else whose is actively using armathentication but is not active on the forums. Pruning is an unfortunately manual process so it is prone to human error on my part. If I mistakenly delete your account, I can ensure your username is recovered if you ping me on IRC.

To clarify the pruning process, accounts targetted for removal are accounts with 0 posts that are older than 5 years whose last login was less than 3 years after registration. Accounts are deactivated for a period of one year before deletion. Deactivated accounts should be able to request reactivation, but ping me on IRC if that doesn't work. To maintain your account simply at least post once or login at least in the 4th year after registration. Side note, it is I think considered best practice to change passwords every now and then, so if you're doing this that should also be resetting the timer on account pruning.

I try to be as forgiving as possible with pruning, but sometimes things fall through the cracks, for which I'll apologize again.
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Agility
Core Dumper
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Joined: Fri Jun 19, 2009 10:22 pm

Re: IMPORTANT - User Account Pruning (deletion)

Post by Agility »

We appreciate all your hard work Tank Program! Thanks for letting us know :)
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