I wouldn't want to delete any users who meet any of the following:

1. lasthere > created + 1 week
2. own any nodes or reapednodes besides homenode
3. logged on in the last 3 months
4. created in the last 1 month

5. homenode doctext or location has content
6. im2 has seen the username

Those are reasonable criteria. If there's ever a concrete plan among the powers-that-be to delete unused accounts, I'd start there.

There are many ways to participate besides posting and any deletion guides should take that into account.

Here are my guidelines for deletion of registered users:

1. Has not logged on in 2 years.
2. Has not achieved sainthood.
3. Deletion only occurs two weeks after an email is sent to the user's address.

If the deleted user has any nodes (excluding reaped ones) then the homenode and username are permanently reserved.

My reasoning is that if a person picks the same name, then the new person will not be associated with the postings of the old one.

Along with any other present content, the homenode will contain a small message indicating that the user has been deleted on such-and-such a date.

I also like LiveJournal's practice of crossing out (or striking out) a username belonging to a deleted account.

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.

A whole meg and a half? Egad.

A whole meg and a half? Egad.

Time to mount another floppy.

90% of every Perl application is already written. ⇒

dragonchild