Lurkers beware: Inactive user purge is imminent

Normen fixed us up with a plugin that will enable us to purge our database of non-human and long-gone users who were never active in the first place. This will give us a better picture of how many truly active, real users we’re actually dealing with. More credible information, less inflated user counts. Oddly enough, looking at other communities, many prefer the latter.



On Saturday, 9th October 2010 => 16. October 2010, ~3000 users will be deleted for good. The bulk of these users are spammers and clones. Some few are humans, but most likely one-time logins.



Your account will not be deleted if it fulfills one of the following criteria:


  • Registered after 2010-09-09

  • Logged in after 2010-09-09

  • Made one or more forum posts



Purging users who don't post is definitely not the agenda here, hence the "logged in" criteria. Feel free to keep browsing our site without posting, but remember to log in once in a while to avoid having your account purged.

In the future we'll only purge inactive accounts around 6 months and older.

I hope i get an email before my account will be deleted due to inactivity. It’s a standard.

Lockhead said:
I hope i get an email before my account will be deleted due to inactivity. It's a standard.

Hmm. That's a good point, however it is not part of the plugin's functionality as it stands. As workaround we could simply send out an e-mail of this announcement to all accounts. The criteria is pretty straight forward; log in if you don't want your account deleted.

Most phishing mails would ask the user to do precisely that, so I think this message might end up being ignored by the bulk of the users… While I agree that purging is a good idea, I think we should stretch the slack a bit. Why not give them a log-in after 01-01-2010?

duenez said:
Most phishing mails would ask the user to do precisely that, so I think this message might end up being ignored by the bulk of the users... While I agree that purging is a good idea, I think we should stretch the slack a bit. Why not give them a log-in after 01-01-2010?
Unfortunately due to our site-move (from Simple Machines Forum to BuddyPress) this is not possible. We only have "last logged in" from 9th September and onwards, since that's when the new site was launched and the old one frozen.

Considering the members with even just a single post won't be deleted, I reckon a month long window for login as a sign of life is good enough. If "Mike54" came back from his 6month trip around the world to find his account had been deleted, all he'd have to do is register again, and all is back to normal, because he had no other information tied to his account anyhow.

Update

I got cold feet and I’m extending the deadline to 16. October 2010. Every old member due for purging should have received a notification by mail. Everyone else, relax :wink:

Purge complete. Please report back to us through contact@jmonkeyengine.com if you are experiencing any problems.