Do you think any of the major forum software, like vBulletin, is missing such a feature? I doubt it.

According to http://tinymicros.com/pm/?goto=MainPage, 14714 monks have logged in once and have no writeups. Assuming the database entry for each of them takes 100 bytes, that's about 1.5 MB of wasted space.

I don't know how many of those users have been absent long enough to warrant deleting them, but lets assume we make the time period six months, and that perlmonks has been around about five years. Lets say only 1/3 of 1.5 MB is the amount of wasted space for users who haven't been back for at least one year (512K). Divide that by 5 to approximate the amount of wasted space per year (102.4K).

We don't want to get rid of users from the past six months, so multiply 102.4K by five years and subtract the wasted space for half a year (51.2K), and that's the approximate amount of wasted space from non-returning registered users (460.8K).

I don't know how bad that is for the server, but my figures are very conservative, and my ysth's main problem with keeping old users registered is that it uses up names that some people might want, and one random example is Barry.

EDIT... I changed my mind from having a one year cut-off to a six month cut-off, but forgot to change everything above accordingly. I guess it doesn't matter.

In reply to Re: Deleting old users by Wassercrats
in thread Deleting old users by Wassercrats

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