I recently discovered my account was deleted and also was able to re-register the same username with the same email address.
It is super frustrating to have my account with all my history deleted. I have used Manjaro since it first came into existence. I had a long history on the forum. This was never a problem in the past.
It’s true that I had not been on the forum in a long time, but that’s because everything has been working well for me with Manjaro and I had no questions to ask. I don’t think long time forum members should just be deleted like that.
I have many accounts at forums that I occasionally use, but also have long periods without using them. I have never been randomly deleted before, let alone with no warning.
Also, having to sign up again and wait to be authorized to post, when one is having a problem one wants help with is not very userfriendly, especially for people who had been on the forum for over a decade.
I really think this policy should be reconsidered.
From a maintenance perspective I agree that inactive accounts should be disabled and purged otherwise a forum instance may grow to an unmaintainable state.
A normal member account is deactivated by the system after 365 days of not being used. I fully understand your point and agree that a longer period would be more user friendly but this is up to the forum @admins.
I’m afraid this is a hard-coded feature of Discourse. I can’t find any setting that would be pertinent to this behavior, except for the already mentioned 60-day timeout on accounts with 0 posts.
It is quite commonplace for online accounts; forums being only one example; to be removed after a period of inactivity. I only narrowly avoided the same for one of my accounts a few weeks ago – I hadn’t used it in two years, but still wished to keep it.
Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to have this kind of policy in effect. After all, a forum is ideally for active members, rather than for those who think they might need it one day.
I would expect this kind of termination, as a matter of course.
BTW… Forum rules still apply, regardless.
The correct procedure would have been to PM one of our Moderation staff with your questions, or at least to start a new topic in an appropriate category.
Deletion on inactivity is generally a good policy.
But maybe it can be fine tuned, depending on what the forum software can. Two of the common examples are keeping accounts that have more than 0 posts and sending notifications per email “your account will be deleted in 1 month if do not login”
Well not really random; there is always a time-out, as membership in the forum isn’t actually linked to the Manjaro installation (there’s no way of knowing if the user is still alive, or - worse still - has moved on to use another distribution!).
I had MyAnonymouse account removed without warning, usually an email turns up saying that your account will be pruned… so I understand your feeling. I was really pissed off.
It’s more usual to get some kind of warning Email one month in advance for most memberships - I hope you checked your spam folders to make sure it wasn’t filtered out, or deleted by accident.
Hopefully it’s going to be resolved pretty quickly.
I have countless forum memberships for all sorts of obscure topics and this is literally the first time this has ever happened to me. This is despite the fact that some of these accounts I sometimes don’t use for a year or more. But I do come back to them. So it seems to me that this is not common practice.
It would therefore also seem that it is not a cause of forums growing to an unmaintainable state (since no one else in my experience is doing this). How much resources does it take for a database to maintain an inactive account? I would imagine it is the most frequent forum posters, like those with tens of thousands of posts, who, in some forums, respond to practically everything whether they have something useful to say or not, who use the most rescources.
There is something else to think about here: data security. Removal of inactive accounts reduces the number of accounts that may be exposed if a site’s security is breached.
On September 18th (2 weeks ago) I received an email from Mozilla Monitor advising that my email address, IP & password had been exposed in a data breach for another forum that I have not visited in the past decade. Fortunately, even back then I always used random-generated passwords, so I am not concerned about that password being used to access other sites that I am a member of.
I really wish that site had deleted my details, instead of holding on to them for so long.
Also, although I am no expert on the European Union & its rules, I do wonder if the EU’s data protection rules also require deletion of inactive accounts after some time. As Manjaro is based in the EU, it may be a requirement to delete inactive accounts after a certain time period.
My suggestion to @cb474 is that they keep their account active by visiting the forum, whilst logged in, to read the associated update announcement before they run their update (which they should always be doing anyway). Stable branch usually has a major update every 1-3 months, which is well below the 1-year threshold for inactive account deactivation.
What IS common practice is for account holders to be sent an email warning them before being pruned. I also signed up for quite a few accounts over the years and quite frequently get an email saying that my account has been inactive and will be removed if I don’t visit…
There’s a link in such emails, giving me the choice to 1. Delete the email, let it go or 2. Visit the link…
So yes, the practice of pruning is common - but not without warning.
Khan Academy
It’s been a while since your child has used Khan Academy, and we’ve missed them! We hope to see them return soon, so they can continue to learn from 100+ free courses at their own pace.
However, in case they’ve moved on for good, we wanted to let you know that their account is scheduled to be deleted in 1 day. We delete inactive accounts in accordance with our privacy policy, to protect our users’ privacy and security.
Photobucket
It’s been a while since you’ve logged into your Photobucket account associated with the email ben2talk@fudge.com. We are currently in the process of deleting inactive accounts and yours will be deleted soon unless we hear from you.
Such prompts are sometimes good reminders that we’ve signed up and then forgotten, and so Manjaro should absolutely send an email at least once per year saying ‘We’ve missed you’ at least… with a view to deactivate (but not delete) such accounts.
