Re: [Savannah-users] Removing old user accounts with no past activity

[Sylvain Beucler]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:35:37PM -0500, Nicodemo Alvaro wrote:
> On 7/30/09, Sylvain Beucler <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > We're talking about 30-40,000 users, sadly.
> 
> Other than keeping accurate statistics, how will it help to remove a
> huge portion of the unknown registered users.
> 
> If it is a hardware issue, I thought Savannah would be getting an
> upgrade sooner or later.
> 
> If it is load issue on the database, is there no other way around this?

I don't think there's any performances issue at stake.

Keeping accurate statistics sounds important to me, if only to get a
clearer idea of far we can support non-full-automated features or make
exceptions.  The more users, the more work, the shier the sysadmins.

In addition I'm generaly in favor of trimming data that is not useful,
to prevent it from piling up. I think maintaining data always has a
cost, we're experiencing it when migrating the user base to the new
frontend in test.

> Are there no other reasons someone would login to Savannah without
> keeping a record? How about to find the mailing list address of the
> project or to contact the developer privately? Some people may not
> prefer the system that savannah uses to track issues, so why force
> them out of these avenues. I forget which one, but some projects may
> not even use savannah's tracking system. Are they wrong to do this?

It's not about enforcing a tracking system.  It just sounds weird to
have an account for a year and not having made a single comment in a
news or tracker item, and not being part of any project.

I did not remember about the e-mail obfuscation issues, you're right
that people may have registered accounts just to get that piece of
information (mailing lists adresses are present on the linked mailman
pages but that doesn't apply to the user contact info indeed).

So maybe we need to implement a way to precisely identify the "last
login" date before trimming accounts, even if they have no past
activity.

I can however trace a subset of ~19200 accounts that weren't used for
the past 5 years - because their password was reset following the 2003
crack and never changed since then.  1400 out of them have a trace on
the system.  I'm in favor of removing the other ones.


You also sound a bit vindicative - is it just me, or is there another
reason why removing unused account is a problem for you? :)

-- 
Sylvain