Do inactive accounts get purged?

[Billy]

Or maybe there a database rollback, or something?
I registered here (with the same name and email) more than a year ago but was never active. I don't remember if I even posted once. Now my account was gone and I had to re-register.

Just curious, so that I can avoid finding myself without an account next time I want to make a very minor edit to the wiki.

[KingMike]

I'd want to guess it's pretty likely 0-post accounts get purged after a time.

[Nightcrawler]

Yes, accounts with no activity, no site contributions, community database link, and no posts, would definitely have been pruned at some point. That fits the profile of the infinite spam accounts we get. On a few occasions we have also pruned accounts with <5 posts, but no site contributions, community database link, and inactive for several years.

Make a contribution to the site or more than 5 posts and you're guaranteed an account for life. Or log on once a year. Unfortunately, we do not have the technology to track wiki changes on the site accounts so they do not count. Under the hood they are still separate accounts that are bridged by third party software. As a result, the datacrystal wiki account should still exist actually, even if the RHDN is pruned.  No one here has ever pruned datacrystal accounts (AnyoneEB may have prior to the RHDN merge) and there are no plans to do so at this time.

[curses]

I had an account that had more than 5 posts get purged. Always wondered about that.

[DarknessSavior]

I had an account that had more than 5 posts get purged. Always wondered about that.

Posts themselves getting purged is normal. Once a year NC will go through the biggest threads and wipe some of the replies from the database so it doesn't get super cluttered (the Screenshots thread, Victoly, Gaming Progress Thread, etc).

~DS

[KingMike]

I remember the thread for that one (dead?) GBA SRW translation project and Ryusui's BoF2 translation got so big they had to be purged regularly (though both also seemed to attract a lot of off-topic flamewars for some reason).

[DarknessSavior]

I remember the thread for that one (dead?) GBA SRW translation project and Ryusui's BoF2 translation got so big they had to be purged regularly (though both also seemed to attract a lot of off-topic flamewars for some reason).

You mean SRW J? That was completed, I think.

~DS

[I.S.T.]

It was. IIRC, I had to lock it once back in the days of me being a mod. That was nearly three years ago, though, so my memory could easily be wrong on locking the thread.

[curses]

Posts themselves getting purged is normal. Once a year NC will go through the biggest threads and wipe some of the replies from the database so it doesn't get super cluttered (the Screenshots thread, Victoly, Gaming Progress Thread, etc).

~DS

I mean that the account itself was purged, and that more than 5 posts were made from it, hardly an inactive account.

[Nightcrawler]

I had an account that had more than 5 posts get purged. Always wondered about that.

Yours was lost in 2009 when VAServ was hacked and 100,000 sites were immediately wiped, including ours. This resulted in the suicide of the creator of the LxAdmin software where the security hole originated. Quite the tragic tale. We lost 2 or 3 months of data that had to be restored, but forum accounts created during that time period were never recovered. I'm pretty sure we told you that at the time when you asked about it.

[curses]

I remember when that server thing happened. But I don't think that the person you are referring to in your post was me. The account I had was more than a few months old, and I never complained about it. I just let it go.
Maybe some day I will search the wayback machine, to confirm some of the details. It's just a matter of curiosity, really.

[Nightcrawler]

What was your old account name? Curses? Do you have a timeframe you think it was originally created? Now you've got me curious. I do often get information/people jumbled after so many people for so many years.

Nonetheless, whatever happened to your account was not the norm and I would imagine an exceptional circumstances of some kind.