(maverick) Re: Perlmonks Zombies - Cleanup?

[maverick]

The definition of 'zombie' has to be constrained to 'logged in once, no posts, homenode length of zero'. Idleness is not enough. tilly has been forced to disappear, I've taken a year long break from PM before...neither of us should have our nodes or accounts altered in any way.

It's easy to adjust the stats to account for inactive and zombie accounts. The wasted disk space in neglible. However the name space aspect of the idea is what gives it merit...wouldn't you hate to have your preferred nick taken by some zombie?

I think jeffa's remark about attempting to contact the person before hand is a neccessary step before feeding a zombie to the NodeReaper.

But this does present a problem though....a year old email address may have bit rotted and no longer be valid.

The email decay couldn't be avoided on the initial clean up, but going forward we could proactively email them one month after they register. "Hey, you've never used the account you've registered on PM. Do you want us to delete it?"

Perhaps they forgot. Perhaps they didn't like PM afterall. Perhaps we need a button that would allow someone who has never posted to terminate their own account...

/\/\averick
OmG! They killed tilly! You *bleep*!!

[PetaMem]

Hello,

ok - so to sum it all up:

• Something has to be done about it
• definition of a "zombie" is: loged in only once, homepage length 0, no writeups
• after n months of inactivity, an attempt is made to bring the zombie back to life with sending an email to him and explaining what will happen. If there is no reaction, m days later the user is purged. (*)
• No purge of nodes just because of inactivity (though I still think 2 years is long enough).
(*) While first being in favour of this, I can very well remember how I feel if I am "spammed" with email from some "uninteresting site". While I like the idea very much to try to bring back monks (not thought of in my post), we cannot assume everyone being as interested in this site as us.

Bye
 PetaMem

[maverick]

Most people won't take issue with a single polite email. After all, they did show enough interest in the site to provide the email address in the first place. It's not like PM wasn't given the address willingly. Sure there will be someone who will get bent out of shape about it, but the vast majority wouldn't. This really doesn't fit the definition of 'spam'...

In one year and a couple of months abigail will reach the two year mark. tilly will eventually reach it. Both of them have given a great deal of wisdom to the site. Node age isn't a metric of worth, and we already have a mechanism for removing worthless nodes. What we're really talking about is the possible removal of 'worthless' users/accounts. tilly and abigail may be gone, but their worth has more than been proven...

/\/\averick
OmG! They killed tilly! You *bleep*!!

[TheHobbit]

Moreover, supressing an account like the tilly's one will give someone the possibility to appropriate that nick, and this is not a Good Thing©

Cheers

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Leo TheHobbit