Old inactive account purge

[Janus]

In order to maintain good performance on the forum, I'm planning to delete a bunch of old inactive members fairly soon.

This is the criteria I'm planning to go with:
[list type=decimal]
    [*]Last logged in over a year ago, or registered over a month ago and never logged in.
    [*]Has 0 posts (officially). Some boards don't add to postcount, which posts wouldn't be accounted for here, but there you go.
    [*]Has been logged in for less than an hour total.
    [*]Has no game badges (no TW games associated with the account).
[/list]
Any account which meets all of those criteria will be deleted. Believe it or not, that will total over 114,000 members, so it will be nearly half our member count.

I'm currently planning to start the purge Monday. It will be a gradual process which I expect to take several days; deleting all extra data associated with an account on a forum this large does actually take a little time.

 

[Orion]

What are the chances? Such accounts have contributed next to nothing to the community, have been inactive for at least a solid month, never spent any significant amount of time lurking, and have no games attached to their account. The accounts are virtually worthless, and with so little invested in them I don't think any of the account creators would remember them, or care if they did.

The only possible exception I can think of are accounts of off-topic posters that went inactive before the forum started recording time logged in (and incidentally before games could be tied to accounts) who never made a post in on-topic. That's an awfully specific and small subgroup. I wouldn't be surprised if it included less than 10 people. Again, it's been so long that I doubt they would remember or care.

 

[Janus]

Question: If someone deleted by the process appears again,  will you be able to reinstate their account?

No, but as Orion said and as per the criteria above, even the rare and unlikely person that might apply to will have lost nothing of real value. They haven't logged in for over a year (or registered over a month ago but never even logged in), they made no posts in the main parts of the forum, they have spent less than an hour online, and they haven't associated any games to their account.

 

[Lord Burgess1]

I nominate Dryvus for deletion.

 

[vadermath]

I nominate Dryvus for deletion.

**** yes, I'd vote for that.

 

[Janus]

The Grand Purge of 2014 has now begun.

It should actually be done within 3-4 hours since I found a quicker way to batch delete them.

 

[Janus]

OK, the purge is now complete.

 

[Janus]

Somewhat related, I'll be updating various server software and restarting the server in a bit less than an hour from now at 5:00 AM GMT (12:00 AM CST), which will result in (hopefully) brief downtime for the forum while I'm working on it. So, heads up.

 

[Michadr]

Somewhat related, I'll be updating various server software and restarting the server in a bit less than an hour from now at 5:00 AM GMT (12:00 AM CST), which will result in (hopefully) brief downtime for the forum while I'm working on it. So, heads up.

An estimate for how long?

Also, if I may ask what are things that clog up the forum the most so to speak. Obviously (or not) It must be posts, am I wrong?

 

[Dryvus]

I nominate Dryvus for deletion.

**** yes, I'd vote for that.

 

[Janus]

An estimate for how long?

Probably not long, but I'm not promising anything as some of the updates are a bit tetchy.

Also, if I may ask what are things that clog up the forum the most so to speak. Obviously (or not) It must be posts, am I wrong?

It depends, but generally speaking the posts do take up the largest part of the actual data and have the most potential to cause performance problems. They're not causing problems for us now, though.

 

[Morbid]

I own 6 copies of warband, 1 with fire and sword, 1 NW, and I never knew you had to attach them to your account.

 

[Janus]

I own 6 copies of warband, 1 with fire and sword, 1 NW, and I never knew you had to attach them to your account.

You don't have to, as such, it's a way to keep track of them through Taleworlds and also give yourself ownership badges on the forum.

 

[Janus]

OK, maintenance is now underway. The forum will go down possibly more than once from this point until I'm done.

 

[Janus]

OK, it was definitely tetchy but everything should be back up and running now, no further downtime.

EDIT:
though search functionality is apparently down; I need to track down what went wrong there.

 

[gokiller]

Nooo!!! Not the search function!!!! Be quick before the countless of threads with stupid questions arrise!! 

 

[noosers]

I was just wondering why it didn´t work at all, I suspected my new firewall.
Mayhaps you want to upload a small notice about it?

 

[Janus]

Search is now fixed, so everything should now be working as before.

EDIT:
So I lied, we did have a further couple of minutes downtime while I was closing a couple of newly open mailserver ports that didn't need to be open.

 

[Search Function]

Whew, scared me for a minute there.

 

[Nahkuri]

When do you allow users to search posts in the order they were posted, Search Function ? At least bring the "search from last x days" feature.