Deletion of unused accounts

[Thomas Wolmer]

To keep the member list easier to manage, and to free up potentially attractive user names, we will within the next few days delete unused accounts - and that means really unused ones. If you read this, you should not have to worry that your account will be deleted.

To qualify as an unused account, all of these criteria have to be met:

• No postings have ever been made from the account.
• The account has not been logged in to since after the same day it was created.
• The account has status Not Activated.
• The account was created before 2006-01-01.

Basically, this means that most of the affected accounts will be from registrations that failed for one reason or another. There are examples of users who have registered four accounts in one day, without ever using any of them.

[Thomas Wolmer]

We have discovered that the last login dates shown in the member profiles are not entirely reliable. If a member has not logged in since some point in time around June 1, 2005, the last login date is set to the same as the registration date. This means that accounts that were actually used, for reading but not for posting, for some period of time during 2004 and early 2005 may also have been deleted.

We apologize to any lurkers that come back after a more than one year long hiatus and find their accounts deleted.

[Thomas Wolmer]

Another purge of unused accounts was performed today.

The criteria for being deleted this time were:

• No postings had ever been made from the account.
  
• The account had status Not Activated.
  
• The account was created before 2008-01-01.

Or:

• No postings had ever been made from the account.
  
• The account had not been logged in to since within a month after it was created.
  
• The account was created before 2006-07-01.

[Thomas Wolmer]

It has been a while since last time, but now there is a new purge ongoing.

The criteria are:

• No postings have ever been made from the account.
  
• The account was created before 2012-01-01.
  
• The account has status Not Activated, or the account has not been logged in to since the day when it was created.