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*!!

In reply to (maverick) Re: Perlmonks Zombies - Cleanup? by maverick
in thread Perlmonks Zombies - Cleanup? by PetaMem

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