The great idle purge, Jan 2017

[Admin]

In a few days, we will be running another idle purge on the forum for users who have not been active for over a year (have not logged in) to both keep the forum user database current and to prevent unnecessary storage of personal information on our server in accordance with our privacy policy.

We will be limiting this purge to people with less than 25 posts to be lenient towards previously very active members who may be on hiatus.

If you have not logged in since 01-01-2016, you can prevent this purge by making sure to log into your account at least once this week.

If your account has been purged, the only way to recover is to create a new account. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

[Moonchild]

Purge completed.

[PhilK]

There are a number of product forums on the web that I participate in only very occasionally, eg when I run into a bug or compatibility issue etc. And sometimes that means not participating for over a year.

I acknowledge that I don't think I will likely end up being impacted here myself, and I appreciate that you are limiting this to people with less than 25 posts. But for those other occasional posters that would get impacted, is it not feasible to just send a warning email to them before purging their account?

Having to create a new account and lose control over all one's prior posts (and possibly private messages, etc) is kind of a PITA.

[Moonchild]

Please see: https://www.palemoon.org/privacy.shtml (linked to from the footer), specifically: "data retention".
There is no easy way to selectively mass e-mail users on the forum based on their last-login status; it's reasonable therefore that people who have not logged in to their account for over a year and have not been active prior to that are clearly not active forum members and should not have their personal data retained. The inconvenience of losing access to private messages is unfortunate but unavoidable. Posts themselves will be retained, and for active users post editing time is already limited, so ultimately makes no difference from a "user control" PoV. In fact, we wouldn't want someone to be able to come in and necro-edit or remove/blank their posts after a year, breaking established public conversations.

[Octopuss]

This is interesting.
When I previously tried to have my accounts on forums I didn't want to use anymore deleted, I always either ran into a wall of silence or was instantly told it was impossible to do because databases, technical obstacles and general blabla. And yet, here inactive users are purged without any problems, even if they had previously posted. Are admins on vast majority of other forums simply lazy then?

[PhilK]

This is interesting.
When I previously tried to have my accounts on forums I didn't want to use anymore deleted, I always either ran into a wall of silence or was instantly told it was impossible to do because databases, technical obstacles and general blabla. And yet, here inactive users are purged without any problems, even if they had previously posted. Are admins on vast majority of other forums simply lazy then?

In my view it's one or the other or a combination of lazy and on-purpose.

The lazy part is self-explanatory, the on-purpose part usually revolves around some variant of trying to make the userbase of site X seem larger than it actually is.

These days personal data is the "new oil", and the more of it any particular site has, the more valuable they are often seen to be by advertisers and so on. So they push push push push to collect as much user data as they can, and give bogus excuses when people want their personal data to be deleted.

[Andrew Gilbertson]

These days personal data is the "new oil", and the more of it any particular site has, the more valuable they are often seen to be by advertisers and so on.

This is particularly dumb on the part of advertisers, because users who haven't logged in in months are unlikely to log in again soon and thus are less likely to see ads. The relevant statistic wouldn't be "number of users in the database" but "number of active users over the past X days", where X is probably some value between 7 and 180 (one week to approximately half a year).

[PhilK]

These days personal data is the "new oil", and the more of it any particular site has, the more valuable they are often seen to be by advertisers and so on.

This is particularly dumb on the part of advertisers, because users who haven't logged in in months are unlikely to log in again soon and thus are less likely to see ads. The relevant statistic wouldn't be "number of users in the database" but "number of active users over the past X days", where X is probably some value between 7 and 180 (one week to approximately half a year).

Sure but in practice there are tons of sites who just incessantly look for ways to bloat their userbase regardless of efficacy or active-ness or quality, because there are apparently still tons of other businesses that consider the sheer number of entities in the user-db to be valuable.

Works that way for dating websites, job search websites, search engines in general, etc.

On a similiar note, I am so ridiculously tired of EVERY SINGLE search function I use practically anywhere these days giving me 99% garbage hits, simply because every one of these businesses believes (and they may be right, much to my chagrin) that it apparently looks far more impressive to users to see thousands and thousands and thousands of endless (often relentlessly duplicated and utterly irrelevant to the search term) hits that cause you to waste hours wading through irrelevant garbage, than a few accurately targeted ones that help you find what you're looking for quickly. (At the possible cost of occasionally revealing the truth about your site: that you don't actually have anything I'm looking for. )

[Moonchild]

We're going waaay off-topic here.

[PhilK]

We're going waaay off-topic here.

Noted and apologies.