Deleting inactive accounts with 0 posts

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Ares

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Hey, so recently I was looking at different names I thought would be cool and while going through them I realized that the majority of them were inactive. A lot of them had a post count of 0 and a last seen date of over a year ago. When going to request a name change there is a rule that you can not take over accounts no matter how old and inactive they are. While I get the concept of the rule, it seems like a lot of awesome usernames are already registered a long time ago by users just for the sake of registering them. It sucks to deny people those names if there is absolutely no activity on the account. So what I'm proposing is if after about 6 months of not being seen with a 0 post count then the account gets deleted and the name becomes available again.

(if there is a reason for not deleting them then sorry for posting I couldn't seem to find a thread specifically about this when I did a search. All that popped up where name change posts in the name change thread along with some VMs)
 

Oglemi

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I am generally against the idea of deleting or editing accounts that seem legit, despite how little they're used, because a) we've all done it before on other forums (I've done it on Bulbagarden for example and I've logged in there maybe twice in the past 4 years with 0 posts but I did so that I could search for users and threads, but I wouldn't want to keep making new accounts cuz mine were deleted or edited) and b) there have been cases of the person coming back and contributing to the site in a significant manner (user darkie is a prime example and user make another, but there have been a lot of 2014ers that have already done it thus far from what I'm seeing in Tournaments). Does it happen often? No, and we're well aware of that.

The reason we decided to add it as a formal blanket rule for all upper staff to stop editing or deleting old accounts was to remove favoritism from the equation, and hence also the creation of the namechange thread in the first place (on top of the fact we were all sick of getting requests to do it via PM).

Is the site due for a purging at some point, particularly to get rid of the old spam accounts? Yea probably, but I'm against doing it on case-by-case bases.

EDIT: Also I should mention that a lot of people from PO create accounts here and Smogon on PO for the express purpose of leaving VMs or PMs to people and probably don't sign into them all too often beyond those times when they need to get in contact with specific people
 
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