For a couple of years, long ago, I ran a quiz channel on IRC. It was a very popular quiz game, offering a lot of features not found in most: statistics per player, per round, per day, per month; user privilege flags to add, edit, moderate, and manage the question database; in-game message retention called gmail; questions in various categories and special rounds with funky rules. Oh, also written in Perl. ;)

You didn't have to "sign up" to get an account; the bot would recognize you by nickname for basic statistics and would learn any new player as soon as they answered a question in the course of the game. The focus was ease of involvement for players. You had to set up a password and authorize to use special features of your account, though.

With the transient nature of IRC, and the network involved, we were getting 800-1000 new player accounts per day.

Since accounts were as cheap as candy to create, and I didn't want newcomers to build on the statistics of old unused players, I implemented a tiered pruning mechanism.

If you had less than 5 points (easy first-day total) and you hadn't been seen for a week, you were erased. These players probably wouldn't even notice that the point system existed, nevermind care, if they returned.

Other tiers were also measured on how many points per month of inactivity, and/or any special clues such as special privileges. Over a certain threshold, the game system just sent a message to an administrator to unlock the user for reaping, and wouldn't reap otherwise.

Back to perlmonks (and other create-an-account websites): I am kind of annoyed that all the "logged in once, no writeups" usernames are off-limits for other people who could be great contributors. I would like to see the site prune most of the ancient non-contributors: if they have not logged in for six months, have not written any nodes, then reap the username and let someone else choose that name.