Non active members on tech-forums.net

Wouldn't be hard to erase members that have been inactive for so long, might take awhile to run the script... BUT, doing that can create issues with threads displaying... As is the database is already screwed up in the fact you can't search for posts of mine during certain time periods.

So yeah, better to leave the database alone.

Pretty much what I was thinking as well.

Never really advised to hard delete things from a database unless necessary; soft deletes (marking as "inactive") is usually a much better practice for databases.
 
Pretty much what I was thinking as well.

Never really advised to hard delete things from a database unless necessary; soft deletes (marking as "inactive") is usually a much better practice for databases.

Trust me, I have done my fair share of deletions (database I had is surely far more massive than TF, think it was around 20GB in size 4 years ago before I left the project...) and they could be done, but you have to insert "dummy" data, which, well, it's pointless unless your database is nothing but statistics. Dummy data on a forum, and such like this is stupid really.
 
Not saying hard deletes can't be done; just usually better (from what I've been taught, at least) to soft delete.
 
We don't remove inactive accounts in general and storage space is a non-issue. We've had members return after many years and dumping their accounts is .. well.. sort of unfriendly.

That said, I've changed up the member list display a bit to make it more useful. While you can use the advanced search to find any member, now 0 post count members will not display on the member list.
 
I actually agree with everybody.. let sleeping dogs lie. Yet so many inactive accounts.. and so many ways to access them.. Doesn't that provide a security risk for the site?

Not that I think TF would be a high profile target....
 
I actually agree with everybody.. let sleeping dogs lie. Yet so many inactive accounts.. and so many ways to access them.. Doesn't that provide a security risk for the site?

Not that I think TF would be a high profile target....

Why would it provide a security risk? The inactive accounts are all normal member tier accounts - they don't have any special permissions or anything like that. If an inactive account is compromised...most they can do is start spamming the site - but even then there's usually always at least 1 staff member on to catch that.
 
Even then I am sure we have plenty of filters to keep that down. The ONLY way I could see so many accounts being a risk, is spam, and spam would only hurt us if the majority of the accounts was compromised at one time.
 
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