Abandoned accounts

[Dannny]

Hi. I just had a question about some user accounts on here that haven't been logged into in awhile. See, I have noticed that under people accounts it says "last visited" and on some people its been almost 10 years. So my question is why don't they just delete their accounts compared to abandoning them. For example, my name is Danny, on this forum I spell Danny with 3 N's in the middle, so its Dannny.  The  reason i had this is because someone else took the name Danny with the regular 2 N's. and his account was last visited like almost 8 years and, and if he had deleted his account, I could have the regular way to spell my name.  I feel this is the case for many people, and for most of these people its safe to say someone doesn't want to part of this community id they haven't logged into their accounts in years.  I hope you understand what I'm saying. Thanks.

[B35 via Church]

I've never heard of deleting some user's account off of some forum screwing up its database.... I was an admin of a forum & staff there would have a field day removing trolls & multi-users (users w/ more than 1 account), before the owner of the place ended up deciding that the forum would no longer be accepting new members.....

As for the concern in question, well, for starters, users can't delete their own accounts.... Secondly, you may find it petty, but there's a benefit to keeping inactive users' accounts intact - the more registrants a forum has, the more popular that forum comes across as being (from an outsider's perspective).... I would say that most people are REALLY hesitant about joining a forum that has been up for as long as this place has (10+ years), with significantly less registrants than what we have here now (whatever the actual # is)..... Removing inactive users for the possibility of a new user wanting a username that an inactive member currently has, is not worth it....

....and even though some members haven't signed on in years, there are some that still lurk on here (of course, you'd have no way in knowing who).... There are a few reasons why inactive members lurk on forums they used to be active at (especially in this NYC transit online community... LOL!), which I won't get into right now....

No offense, but I'm quite sure that there are a few people on here w/ the real first name "Danny" that have forum usernames having nothing (and wanting to have nothing) to do with their real name....

First come, first serve.... If that's a deterrent to someone signing up to a forum, then that isn't a person I'd want around, quite honestly....

 

 

[LGA Link N Train]

Well, I guess that accounts that haven't been logged in for a certain period of time get deleted but the data remains on the site and nothing happens to it. I've experienced this thing wit Google where I made a bunch of junk accounts (and trust me, they were full of junk that I regret making them in the first place) but I know that if you don't log in to a google account for a certain period of time that it gets deleted but the data remains sitting there. I'm not sure if NYC Transit Forums does the same thing with deleting accounts but leaving the data sitting there. Good Question though.

[trainfan22]

On this other message board I post on, whenever a poster asks to delete their account the admin of that site said that deleting an entire user account would mess up the forums database, I would imagine that something silmar would happen here if a poster with hundreds or thousands of posts got their account deleted.