Re: Removing user accounts

How much does it hurt PM to have those extra users? Obviously those accounts take some disk space, but are they otherwise detrimental to the site?

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see useless multiple accounts removed, but I am not sure how much work it would be to monitor new accounts, see if they're very similar to another account, possibly contact both account holders (it could just be a user group who all want similar handles (unlikely, but hey it could happen)), and determine whether the accounts should be removed at all.

Comment on Re: Removing user accounts

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Re: Re: Removing user accounts by Theo (Priest) on Nov 10, 2003 at 23:47 UTC
There seem to be over 20,000 initiates and less than 1200 novices. That suggests to me that there are a lot of monks who checked in once to ask a question or just looked around and never came back. It seems there could be a lot server time used searching through those inactive/never used accounts. If the accounts are stored on the server in any kind of order then perhaps, once in a while, reordering them by "last here" could reduce that search time by quite a bit. Or it may not be a problem at all. What do I know? :) -theo- (so many nodes and so little time ... ) Note: All opinions are untested, unless otherwise stated	[reply]
Re: Re: Removing user accounts by TomDLux (Vicar) on Nov 11, 2003 at 18:56 UTC
If an unused account uses 1 KB, and there are a million unused accounts, that comes to 1 GB. Ten years ago that was the entire hard drive for a Sparc 10 that was shared between 7 users, but with this week's hard drive prices, it's worth between fifty cents and a dollar, Canadian. Now if they were locking up good useful NAMES, that might be a cause for concern. -- `TTTATCGGTCGTTATATAGATGTTTGCA`	[reply]