** Clean Up proposal - Removing old, never active accounts **
For purpose of internal discussion and to gauge people's opinions, I am opening a discussion topic on this subject -- here, in Public.
I had very recently brought this up internally, in a Staff only area (essential for sensitive discussions, and common in all internet sites).
The image included in this post is a snapshot of my post there - - which looks much nicer than it could ever be here (until we get better, enhanced text format supported).
This idea was motivated by my belief this deserves attention, and by a very recent post by Paul Sutton -- asking what the meaning of 'active'users is on the server stats displayed at the front doors.
My post follows, in Text form. Look forward to your comments, suggestions and participation. Thank you.
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A pet peeve of mine.
I would have done it myself. Proposing here for discussion and possible action.
* that long term, never active accounts represent a Zero value added to instance.
* that such accounts can be dormant ones for video sharing people, as we had before
* that high number of users doesn’t really matter, this is my personal opinion.
I propose that :sparkler:
* inactive accounts, zero posts ever, older than a certain threshold, be eliminated.
A report from the admin panel could provide some stats on how many those would be
The threshold I would suggest – one year and older, inactive, Nuke applied.
Thank you.
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Screenshots included :
1. Forum post snapshot.
2. The content of this post, as seen in a properly full formatted way. Markdown enhanced.
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The counter points to this:
1) We already seperate out stats between active users and registered. So by removing old accounts it would make the registered number useless as we would effectively be reducing it to the active count. Aside from perhaps being dishonest to our users it prevents us from actually being able to know the ratio of active users to registered users, as the registered user count doesnt represent anything meaningful.
2) Users who register with no activity represent 0 value, but also represent 0 negative sides. They do nothing to decrease the quality of the instance
3) users may wish to have an account for read-only purposes. There is no harm in that
4) we can not truely delete accounts, it looks more like a suspension. This means users can not re-register later without them emailing an admin. This adds extra work load on admins, hassle for potential users, and with no gain.
5) there is no easy way to suspend accounts on the criteria you suggests. Someone (me?) would have to invest time and energy to write a script to do it.
6) many users want a server with expiernce and a history. The registered user count reflects this. For that reason many users pick their instance specifically because they have a large registered user count. so we would be doing ourselves harm
It seems to me there are quite a few down sides to doing this and not a single positive effect I can think of... What, exactly, is to be gained by doing this?
Fair points there, I was just thinking about how people may see the number of active uses vs registered users.
As an alternative we can come up with a text explanation to counter any arguments people may have for that.
I believe that a reported number of users who have :
* at least bothered to login once, in the past 12 months.
* posted a single Byte in the instance.
...is not in any way distorted.
Mastodon network user count is approaching 4 million accounts, as seen in the Stats posts in federated timeline.
Well -- how many of those are similar Zombie accounts?
How many are multiple accounts held by one single active user for some reason ? (I have about 12 atm, and increasing. With reasons)
I don't want to spend much time arguing, my logic is on the OP above, and I have other projects to spend time on -- more ideas deserving attention and effort than time, which is precious.
So carry on, let's hear the people's voices.
So if I understand you your whole argument is you want a statistic that shows people who are not active, but were at one point active, and thus serve a purpose that neither the active user account nor the current registered user account serves?
If that is the case I'd say the best solution is just to add a 3rd statistic to be reported, it can report "dormant accounts" and provide the number of all users that have posted at least once, but include users even if they have not been active in more than 2 months.
That solution would provide the number you suggest to people but not have any of the negative side effects I listed.
