I was noodling around a couple of weeks ago with epoptai's highly recommended xNN Newest Nodes reader and spotted the creation of three new monks that caught my attention. I left it alone for a while to see what would happen. It turns out nothing did, but nonetheless it's interesting. It also lends credence to a certain degauss's request for an old, unused nick to be recycled.

On the 28th of June, at 00:59, someone registered the nick Dutchmen. So far, nothing out of the ordinary. After twenty minutes or so, I suspect that the same person suddenly realised that he (or she) had registered a nick that is, well, plural. Sort of odd, unless you're sharing a login with a football team or something. So (I assume), the person went and registered the singular version of the name.

But wait! Unfortunately, through a slip of the keyboard, he made a mistake, and registered, no more than twenty three minutes later, the nick Dutchcman! This time he realised the error more quickly, and three minutes later registered the nick Dutchman which we may presume to be the definitive handle for someone, somewhere (probably in the Netherlands).

It turns out that in the intervening period, none of these accounts have made any posted, although Dutchman did come back a day later.

So here's the thing. I think it's a pretty safe bet to say that those first two monks are never going to be active, and the only time anyone is ever going to stumble across them is by visiting random nodes (as I am wont to do at times).

But wait! There's more!

I was noodling around jcwren's crack^Wstats page and saw that the longest nick is 34 characters long. Heh, too bad the account appears dead. Anyway, never one to be outdone, I thought I would pulverise this feeble attempt with something really long. And as I was listening to The Orb at the time, I rushed to register A huge ever growing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraworld (or the centre of the universe, depending on what remix you are listening to). Weighing in at eighty characters, a single heh from me would fill up the Chatterbox!

Sadly, the monk creation page let me go ahead and register that nick, never telling me that it was going to [gasp] truncate it. So now I am the proud owner of the nick A Huge Ever Growing Pu. Pathetic, isn't it? If I could, I would delete it. Well I don't know, it does make a sort of funny in-joke.

Hence, it would be nice to be able to delete (your own) monk account, especially if you've never posted anything from it.


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g r i n d e r

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Zombie monks
by particle (Vicar) on Jul 09, 2001 at 20:54 UTC
    how do you know these monks are not simply in the midst of a vow of silence?

    i'm going on a solo road trip across north america starting monday that will last between four and six weeks. although i'll be carrying my laptop so i can keep up with my business accounting and such, i doubt i'll be frequenting perlmonks with any regularity. so on this site, i will be silent. i will not be working. i'm traveling alone for most of the trip, over 10,000 miles.

    but i'll be back. wouldn't it be a shame if my vow of silence, my spiritual journey across this great country, led to my removal from this community?

    with any luck, i'll make monk this week... and one of my first acts as a monk will be to execute a vow of silence. i find that suprisingly appropriate. but you must be very careful what criteria are used to remove monks, as i'd be upset if my hiatus led to my removal.

    ~Particle

[reply]

      I'm suggesting nothing of the sort. I see you have added 44 nodes to site. For this reason, you will never be removed, even if you are silent for ten years and some other person comes along and says that they want the particle nick. I hope I'm still around in ten years time and if someone makes that claim I'll say "no, I remember the original particle, so you should think of another nick." I'm talking about user accounts created by accident, or created on a whim, that will never, ever see any activity.

      Anyway, have a nice trip. I just went offline for a week and it was hell. I mean, being offline was great, but now my inbox looks like hell.


      --
      g r i n d e r
[reply]
      how do you know these monks are not simply in the midst of a vow of silence?

      That is a remarkable question to ask after reading a node that is careful to give examples that specifically answer the question.

      He gave *two* examples of how he knows!

[reply]
        i guess i should have added a smiley, or <joke></joke> tags...

        this not was meant in a harsh tone. i found the thought quite amusing.

        ~Particle

[reply]
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Re: Zombie monks
by LD2 (Curate) on Jul 10, 2001 at 06:46 UTC
    It'd be interesting and maybe convient to be able to delete one's nick in user settings - possibly have a checkbox that allows one to request to be deleted. A script or whatnot can run once a night to clear up nicks. I'm not sure how often someone would want to do that or if that option would be abused(having other monks create fun and interesting nicks just for a day.. for a joke? :)). But, it is an idea and like those ideas that have followed before this one - it's something to contemplate whether or not it would be nice to be implemented or does it actually *need* to be implemented. I'll leave that up to the elders and our fearless leader.
[reply]
      Bad idea. Especially with javascript still possible in home nodes. An editor request could be a possibility, but some sort of auto-nomination would be a good idea. A previous thread, Old, unused nick desired.., covered why deleting any nicks that have writeups would be a bad idea.
[reply]
Re: Zombie monks
by pmas (Hermit) on Jul 10, 2001 at 00:36 UTC
    Maybe as an extra precaution we can send email about nick being deleted to email address provided on registration. If no complains in say a month, IMHO we can safely delete this nick.

    Of course, if we ever decide to clean unused nicks.

    pmas

    To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.

[reply]
Re: Zombie monks
by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Jul 10, 2001 at 02:26 UTC
    I guess we'll all be calling you Pu from now on. That'll be fun to explain to newbys, won't it?

    Why did it truncate you to less than the old record?

    —John

[reply]

      The maximum length of nicks was drastically shortened because such people being logged in (or even worse, chatting) cause the right-hand margin to get too wide and no one could /msg them to complain so vroom "fixed" it.

      See Username length limit which links to Username limits and then see Super Search. ;)

              - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")
[reply]
Re: Zombie monks
by tadman (Prior) on Jul 11, 2001 at 06:39 UTC 
    if ( $user->{last_login_time} < $ages_ago
 &&  $user->{posts}           <= 0
 &&  $user->{xp}              < 10
 && !$user->{special})
{
    DeleteUser($user);
}

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

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