Account Deletion

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Hi Smogon, I have an idea that I think would be beneficial. Some people make accounts on Smogon Forums and never use them. I know a few users that haven't been online since 2006, and obviously never will come back. After long periods of time, if an account hasn't been active, I think it should be deleted. I'm not sure if it will take up space on the website or anything, but it would be helpful if another user wants to use that name.

Another instance is if a user passes away, which has happened before with Smogon users. If the user dies, they obviously won't come back on Smogon so after a certain period of time, I think the account should be delete so people won't have to reply to their threads and expect an answer or something, plus it would be pretty sad if their account were still there.

Please let me know what you think of this idea!
 
Well, I'm not sure if this is such a good idea because you'll have no idea how long a member will be inactive due to circumstances out of their control (eg. Internet cuts) you'll never know if they PLAN to return someday, okay if people say "I'm leaving forever". The only possible idea I can think of is if people can cancel their own account or request it in some way? People might get mad or something if they show up with no account, when they couldn't access smogon for a year or something. Fair enough to those who havent visited since their sign up date years ago, but how would you possibly set a "deadline" for deleting an account?
 
How about we just delete accounts automatically if they have zero posts and no activity for more then six months (or some other arbitrary amount of time)?
There are probably thousands that fall under this category. It might be more trouble than it's worth though if they don't take up memory.

Edit: okay there at least 500 pages (30 accounts a page) of users with no posts.
Not entirely all of them are inactive obviously, but hey, thats 15 thousand accounts with no posts possibly taking up memory for no reason.

Edit2: 1050 & 1/2 pages of accounts with zero posts.
30,000 accounts.
 
It took me 6 months to start posting after I signed up.

We will not, and should not, delete old accounts.

End of story.

EDIT: Besides, if someone else has the name you were going to use, then that forces you to be a little more creative in choosing your username.
 
You really shouldn't be replying to threads or posts that are 6 months old to begin with.

Deleting accounts for users that have passed away is rather disrespectful. The same could be said for accounts/users that have made an impression on the site (like Cathy). By hard deleting an account all their threads and posts vanish, so many older threads can immediately make little sense. It would suck to go into Smogon's Greatest Hits and read a thread from 2007 only to have half the posts missing because some of the users left. Even if they don't come back, their accounts should be preserved. I know Cathy made one sweep for inactive accounts awhile back (around the time people could make their own name changes), so sweeps for useless accounts (ie years of inactivity and very few posts) isn't out of the question, it just shouldn't be automatic.
 
I like the idea of requesting an account to be deleted, but as Veedrock said, reading some old threads would be very weird if posts were randomly missing. Either that or people would have those same names but appear to have credit for whatever posts/threads that first person had.
 
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