Why doesn't pokemaster just delete the accounts of inactive users?

Question

Self-explanatory. sorry if this was asked before.

Comments

Because I’d get emotional if PM deleted mew’s account

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Mew was last active in april fool, when I went to the chat room, i found someone named Mewderator was here 1 minute ago

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You can change your name to "Mega-$ceptile".

Answer 1

Is this self explanatory? I don't see the point in it. What in particular do we achieve from deleting people's accounts?

What if those users return later and find their account is gone? Sempiternus didn't use his account until half a year after he made it. What if they're lurkers and one day find their account doesn't exist?

If you're talking more than just the mass of users who don't have any posts, deleting inactive accounts that made posts in the past would cause them to be assigned the name 'anonymous', which damages thread continuity among others things.

It would free up some usernames perhaps, but that would become very confusing the moment one of those users comes back and finds someone else posting under the name they registered.

Comments

If you wanted to delete accounts, you could minimize the chances of this happening by only deleting those accounts which are "more dead" than others.
such as those with no activity AT ALL since joining, and set a minimum time requirement, say, five years? that would get rid of a few users.
it would have to be a long time, because lurkers could still be there.
can you see how often people come onto the site? or, when/if they log onto chat? that may also be helpful information to have, if you guys ever decide to have your own little purge.

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But the question remains, why even bother? There is nothing to gain, the way I’ve interpreted it. Pokemaster should spend the time on something productive.
I don’t think I want to purge anybody to be honest, lol.

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Yes, I was talking about the mass of inactive users.

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Yeah that makes sense. Still don’t quite follow the motivation for it though.

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There are just way too many possible problems in the long run that makes deleting accounts completely impossible, unless you want to chance ruining the system.

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What about these inappropriate accounts?

https://pokemondb.net/pokebase/meta/35036/profile-cleaner-bros-cleaning-up-your-profiles-since-1743

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Pokemaster just edits those profiles to clear them out, or changes their username.

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Actually I had completely forgotten about that "Profile Bros" question until it was bumped recently. There were some inappropriate names that had been around for 4 years! But I went through them yesterday and cleared out the bad ones.

I actually did delete several accounts, but only because that was easier than having to go into the database to edit their names lol. I general your answer is correct, there is no reason to delete old inactive accounts.