Can an abandoned account be removed?

[dsattler]

I wanted to register under a fancy name and tried "bitman", but this one is already taken.
I have checked out the profile of user bitman and it's an old one:

Date Registered:   June 22, 2011, 11:42:28 AM

But he has an activity value of zero, no posts, nothing! I have also sent him a PM, but no answer (he didn't make his email address public).

So my question to the mods of this forum:

What is your policy regarding abandoned accounts (if you have one). Can you simply delete accounts and give it back to the free account pool if not used for one year? I think that would be reasonable. Or you could sell fancy account names in an auction, could reduce the cost of keeping the forum up and running.

[1715352529]

1715352529

[1715352529]

1715352529

[1715352529]

1715352529

[1715352529]

1715352529

[hilariousandco]

I wanted to register under a fancy name and tried "bitman", but this one is already taken.
I have checked out the profile of user bitman and it's an old one:

Date Registered:   June 22, 2011, 11:42:28 AM

But he has an activity value of zero, no posts, nothing! I have also sent him a PM, but no answer (he didn't make his email address public).

So my question to the mods of this forum:

What is your policy regarding abandoned accounts (if you have one). Can you simply delete accounts and give it back to the free account pool if not used for one year? I think that would be reasonable. Or you could sell fancy account names in an auction, could reduce the cost of keeping the forum up and running.

But what about Satoshi?   I think if the accounts haven't been used at all then they should/could be pruned after a year or whatever, but not with accounts that have been used but not logged into for a while.

[jackjack]

could reduce the cost of keeping the forum up and running.

Lol

[joesmoe2012]

I wish joesmoe would be pruned as well. I created the account when I first joined trying to be all anonymous and stuff...now i can't remember what email i created for it.

Its my account, i've never used it, but now my name here has to be joemsoe2012

[justusranvier]

I'd like to recover my original account, but I've lost the password and closed the email account it was tied to.

The account I'm using now was one I created for a business I worked for in 2011 that sold refurbished classic arcade games for btc. That business folded, but I kept using this account because it had more activity than my personal account. Eventually I changed this account's name and let the old one retire.

I'd kind of like to recover the original account though since it has a July 2010 join date.

[dsattler]

But what about Satoshi?   I think if the accounts haven't been used at all then they should/could be pruned after a year or whatever, but not with accounts that have been used but not logged into for a while.

So we have two cases:

1. Abandoned accounts without posts, created but never used.
2. Abandoned accounts with posts, like joesmoe with forgotten login credentials.

Case 1 is easy, but 2 is difficult! Maybe you could alter the name to something like "joesmoe(old)" for the old posts and then delete the account to make it available again?

[deepceleron]

Removal of old accounts is not unprecedented. Many users have requested account deletion on this forum, and others may have been deleted for non-publicized reasons. I did some data crunching, and got 3565 missing account numbers, either because they were deleted or were never created; here's a partial listing:

Code:

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2999

A lot of web services remove accounts after inactivity, even if it's an email box full of emails or a file sharing site with images or files. The dickheads at dyndns deleted my personal domains because I hadn't logged in for 30 days.

I compiled a list of account numbers with the following criteria:

• Have never logged in since the day the account was created,
• have zero posts,
• were created before 2013.

This is just a minimum criteria for junk accounts that can be pruned. There are 38276 of those (of 200,000+):
http://we.lovebitco.in/deadacct.csv

Code:

"usernum"	"Name"	"Posts"	"Date Registered"	"Last Active"
258	"krs"	0	06/17/10 04:39 PM	06/17/10 04:39 PM
266	"gtwickline"	0	06/21/10 12:16 AM	06/21/10 12:38 AM
276	"david718"	0	06/25/10 05:17 PM	06/25/10 05:17 PM
280	"mhatta"	0	06/28/10 12:56 AM	06/28/10 03:09 AM
286	"hotdrop"	0	06/29/10 11:48 PM	06/30/10 12:10 AM
296	"thekremlin"	0	07/06/10 12:05 PM	07/07/10 06:49 AM
300	"Jamespunte"	0	07/08/10 06:02 AM	07/08/10 06:03 AM
301	"Pilot"	0	07/08/10 09:47 AM	07/08/10 09:59 AM
304	"jondavis468"	0	07/09/10 05:33 PM	07/09/10 05:39 PM
307	"Comatus"	0	07/11/10 01:11 PM	07/11/10 01:11 PM
319	"koskenkorva"	0	07/12/10 03:34 AM	07/12/10 05:20 AM
324	"JoesphCros"	0	07/12/10 05:33 AM	07/12/10 05:34 AM
...

One could even up that criteria to accounts that have zero posts and have not been logged into for a year, for 44007 accounts: http://we.lovebitco.in/deadacct1yr.csv

(edit: re-uploaded in tab-delimited, quoted unicode format for better chance you can import correctly; there are many wacky user names with weird characters on purpose.)

What are old accounts hurting? Cleaning up would remove some of these from use as a currency in old account resale, and also lower the scamming account takeover possibilities the next time there is a data breach.

[btcton]

Removal of old accounts is not unprecedented. Many users have requested account deletion on this forum, and others may have been deleted for non-publicized reasons. I did some data crunching, and got 3565 missing account numbers, either because they were deleted or were never created; here's a partial listing:

Code:

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A lot of web services remove accounts after inactivity, even if it's an email box full of emails or a file sharing site with images or files. The dickheads at dyndns deleted my personal domains because I hadn't logged in for 30 days.

I compiled a list of account numbers with the following criteria:

• Have never logged in since the day the account was created,
• have zero posts,
• were created before 2013.

This is just a minimum criteria for junk accounts that can be pruned. There are 38276 of those (of 200,000+):
http://we.lovebitco.in/deadacct.csv

Code:

"usernum"	"Name"	"Posts"	"Date Registered"	"Last Active"
258	"krs"	0	06/17/10 04:39 PM	06/17/10 04:39 PM
266	"gtwickline"	0	06/21/10 12:16 AM	06/21/10 12:38 AM
276	"david718"	0	06/25/10 05:17 PM	06/25/10 05:17 PM
280	"mhatta"	0	06/28/10 12:56 AM	06/28/10 03:09 AM
286	"hotdrop"	0	06/29/10 11:48 PM	06/30/10 12:10 AM
296	"thekremlin"	0	07/06/10 12:05 PM	07/07/10 06:49 AM
300	"Jamespunte"	0	07/08/10 06:02 AM	07/08/10 06:03 AM
301	"Pilot"	0	07/08/10 09:47 AM	07/08/10 09:59 AM
304	"jondavis468"	0	07/09/10 05:33 PM	07/09/10 05:39 PM
307	"Comatus"	0	07/11/10 01:11 PM	07/11/10 01:11 PM
319	"koskenkorva"	0	07/12/10 03:34 AM	07/12/10 05:20 AM
324	"JoesphCros"	0	07/12/10 05:33 AM	07/12/10 05:34 AM
...

One could even up that criteria to accounts that have zero posts and have not been logged into for a year, for 44007 accounts: http://we.lovebitco.in/deadacct1yr.csv

(edit: re-uploaded in tab-delimited, quoted unicode format for better chance you can import correctly; there are many wacky user names with weird characters on purpose.)

What are old accounts hurting? Cleaning up would remove some of these from use as a currency in old account resale, and also lower the scamming account takeover possibilities the next time there is a data breach.

How did you get this data? I can tell you didn't process that manually .

[deepceleron]

How did you get this data? I can tell you didn't process that manually .

I scraped it and processed it programmatically. I used libreoffice calc to do the formulas determining what users fit the criteria.

[whiskers75]

How did you get this data? I can tell you didn't process that manually .

I scraped it and processed it programmatically. I used libreoffice calc to do the formulas determining what users fit the criteria.

Share your program? 

[deepceleron]

How did you get this data? I can tell you didn't process that manually .

I scraped it and processed it programmatically. I used libreoffice calc to do the formulas determining what users fit the criteria.

Share your program?  

I think I could share the user list instead, I left the site scraper running over the holiday, no point in another 200K page hits to get the same data.

Just to show that it took some work, here's some code with the page field-finding:

Code:

        lines = got.splitlines()
        if len(lines) < 24:
            continue
        templist = [str(usernum), '', '', '', '', '']
        lineindex = ['Name:', 'Posts:', 'Activity:', 'Date Registered:', 'Last Active:']
        for i in xrange(23, len(lines)-2, 1):
            ln = lines[i].strip('\t')[7:-9].strip()
            if len(ln) > 2 and ln[-1] == ':':
                for j in xrange(len(lineindex)):
                    if ln == lineindex[j]:
                        templist[j+1] = (lines[i+1].strip('\t ')[4:-5])

To get a line like this (which I grabbed now since I discarded the input files):
56964, whiskers75, 767, 406, April 29, 2012, 06:22:52 AM, <b>Today</b> at 03:51:15 PM

I converted the dates to ISO time with a post-process on the downloaded csv, and also didn't foresee the hassle caused by users with commas and random crap in their user names, as my downloader had made a comma-seperated list instead of tabs, quotes, or some other escape character around usernames. I fixed those manually instead of doing the work of rewriting the scraper to a different format.

Here's a snippet of fixing the date:

Code:

    month_dict = {"January": '01', "February": '02', "March": '03', "April": '04', "May": '05', "June": '06',
              "July": '07', "August": '08', "September": '09', "October": '10', "November": '11', "December": '12'}
    
    if z[7][:12] == '<b>Today</b>':
        datetimel = '2013-12-31T00:00:00'
    elif z[7][:5] == 'Never':
        datetimel = 'Never'
    else:
        md = z[7].split()
        m = md[0]
        d = md[1]
        t_ap = z[9].split()
        t = t_ap[0]
        ap = t_ap[1]
        hms = t.split(':')
        if ap == 'AM' and hms[0] == '12':
            hms[0] = '00'

        if ap == 'PM' and hms[0] != '12':
            hms[0] = str(int(hms[0])+12)

        hms = ':'.join(hms)
        m = month_dict.get(m)
        datetimel = z[8] + '-' + m + '-' + d + 'T' + hms

after (your stats from when I got the list)
56964   whiskers75   731   392   2012-04-29T06:22:52   2013-12-31T00:00:00

I wrote it as an inactive-finder, so "today" got a magic date.

To find missing numbers, it was faster to look for gaps than to use some python-esque list comprehension generator class def:

Code:

nonlist = []
for i in xrange(len(memnumlist)):
    if i > len(memnumlist)-2:
        continue
    else:
        if memnumlist[i+1] - memnumlist[i] > 1:
            nonlist.extend(range(memnumlist[i]+1, memnumlist[i+1]))

[theymos]

Removal of old accounts is not unprecedented. Many users have requested account deletion on this forum, and others may have been deleted for non-publicized reasons. I did some data crunching, and got 3565 missing account numbers, either because they were deleted or were never created

There was one purge of inactive accounts a long time ago, and it used to be policy to delete the accounts of spammers. But accounts are almost never deleted nowadays.

Note that I reserve the right to reuse old account numbers. I've done this at least once.

[CryptKeeper]

@deepceleron: thank you for doing all that work and for sharing it with us, highly appreciated!

Nice username by the way, good sense of humor. 

[btcton]

How did you get this data? I can tell you didn't process that manually .

I scraped it and processed it programmatically. I used libreoffice calc to do the formulas determining what users fit the criteria.

Did you scrape it from the "Members" page or is there some other way I am not aware of?

[deepceleron]

How did you get this data? I can tell you didn't process that manually .

I scraped it and processed it programmatically. I used libreoffice calc to do the formulas determining what users fit the criteria.

Did you scrape it from the "Members" page or is there some other way I am not aware of?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=138637;wap2

[vadoff]

Usually the policy for almost all websites is to keep the account regardless of inactivity, so doubt it.

[bitpop]

Usually the policy for almost all websites is to keep the account regardless of inactivity, so doubt it.

Lol not Yahoo

[bitpop]

Renaming old accounts is a great Idea