118961 Users With No Posts To Date

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Jonah Bron
DevNet Master
Posts: 2764
Joined: Thu Mar 15, 2007 6:28 pm
Location: Redding, California

118961 Users With No Posts To Date

Post by Jonah Bron »

That's a lot. Couldn't you run a query like...

Code: Select all

DELETE FROM userstable WHERE posts = 0 AND lastvisit < 1072947600
... that? Isn't that taking up a lot of space? I mean, one hundred thousand null users?

P.S. 1072947600 is Jan 1st, 2004.
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Benjamin
Site Administrator
Posts: 6935
Joined: Sun May 19, 2002 10:24 pm

Re: 118961 Users With No Posts To Date

Post by Benjamin »

Well, there's actually more than that:

[text]mysql> select count(*) from phpbb_users where user_posts = 0;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 141162 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.17 sec)
[/text]

As far as I know it's not our policy to delete these accounts. I would guess 60% of these are spammers who have created profiles with links in them. I've already cleared a majority of that junk out but I didn't delete the accounts. There could be reasons why people choose to sign up but not post. Keeping track of what posts they have read or perhaps subscribing to certain topics. I don't see the benefit of clearing these out because it's not hurting performance.
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Jonah Bron
DevNet Master
Posts: 2764
Joined: Thu Mar 15, 2007 6:28 pm
Location: Redding, California

Re: 118961 Users With No Posts To Date

Post by Jonah Bron »

Benjamin wrote:There could be reasons why people choose to sign up but not post. Keeping track of what posts they have read or perhaps subscribing to certain topics.
That's why I added the lastvisit condition.
Benjamin wrote:I don't see the benefit of clearing these out because it's not hurting performance.
Maybe not performance, but what about space?
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Benjamin
Site Administrator
Posts: 6935
Joined: Sun May 19, 2002 10:24 pm

Re: 118961 Users With No Posts To Date

Post by Benjamin »

Yeah I saw that. Here's some things I would like to point out:

1. A vast majority of those accounts were created within the last year or so.
2. They have been rendered harmless because their profiles & signatures have been cleared.
3. Only the posts and search tables use non-trivial disk space.
4. We have plenty of disk space. 100gb or so.
5. I don't fully trust that all of these accounts truly have 0 posts. There could have been a bug in any number of the phpBB versions causing these to be out of sync. It could be checked of course, it's just a matter of time.
6. Some sites have a policy of deleting dormant accounts after a period of time, we have never done this. I wouldn't want to cause anyone to lose a user name they have registered just because they didn't post or login recently. I have a gmail account that I created and didn't login to use for a solid year. It was still active and I was happy.
7. This isn't an action I would take without 100% agreement from all of the administrators and input from the moderators. Unless we had a way to preserve accounts that have a possibility of being used again I would vote against deleting these. If there was a concise way to delete all of the accounts with spammy user names I would support that, even at the risk of deleting a few legitimate accounts with 0 posts.
phpwalker
Forum Commoner
Posts: 81
Joined: Sun Apr 23, 2006 12:18 pm

Re: 118961 Users With No Posts To Date

Post by phpwalker »

Glad that my account is still here, though. :drunk:
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