I have seen many users whose accounts have been inactive since a long time. E.g., if you check the 'last seen' date on profile pages of the following users, you will see that they haven't logged in for more than 2 years. These are users I have picked out randomly from the user search. I DO NOT intend to point out anyone in particular. https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/ila%C3%A7lamawandy.666411/ https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/nothingispossible.642993/ https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/brvpkumaras775.554920/ https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/paragmasteh.669854/ https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/bob-b.31126/ https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/bawa.503652/ https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/bhawna-aneja.514975/ https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/jagdev-kalsi.632687/ https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/loot-me.511904/ https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/b-m-design.49233/ https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/sowmya-shetty.509287/ https://www.digitalpoint.com/members/lejibet.560717/ There indeed may be much more. That's a considerably long inactivity time on a forum that pulls huge traffic and is the largest online webmaster community. I think this unnecessarily wastes the forum's space. How about setting a rule that an account will automatically be deleted if there's no activity on it for a certain time period, say 6 months or 1 year (or whatever the mods find appropriate)? Of course we send an email notification to the user before doing so. Will it help to reduce clutter and stop people from creating accounts if they don't intend to use them regularly or at least on occasion? P.S: Some of these accounts contain important data. So we might consider deleting ONLY those which have not really contributed anything useful to the forum.
I don't mean delete every account that's inactive. I am talking about those accounts that do not have any useful or informative posts or those which have not contributed anything valuable to the forum. I reckon it wastes the forum's space to keep such accounts. No doubts about the server's capacity, it can store thousands of them. But then again, I don't deem it necessary. Anyway, that's just me.
You can never know when some of the users come back after more than a year. For example, me. I came back about a month ago (I believe) after a couple of years when I was done with running websites due to stresses and other reasons but after logging back in my account I was very thankful and glad that my account is still here. So I believe that is the reason of Shawn's (@digitalpoint) answer is because he doesn't want to remove the old accounts in case if anyone come back in a few years and besides accounts registering doesn't take a much of storage on servers while posts/threads does.
Totally agree, I had seen lots of users coming back after 4-5 years to complain about migration and new forum rules
In what context do those old users or threads create "clutter". Searches are listed in date order, forum sections in date order. All deleting those people would do is rewrite history and make it appear as if they never existed. meetup.com deleted my account - I hadn't been there in years and tried to go back to a group I'd been a member of. I was pissed off about that. I still had email notifications from back in the day so I knew my reg email but it was gone. Bad PR.
I thought that accounts which are inactive for a long time are unnecessary unless they are important in some respect because they wasted the forum's space. I have never really been on any forum so much before I joined DP. Anyway, now I see esp. from the replies above, that there are many users who log back in after years. I also see that it kinda offends some when they find their account deleted. In any case, thanks for your reply and sharing.