Last modified: 2007-04-02 07:02:56 UTC
It would be lovely if MediaWiki had the option of deleting inactive accounts. Now, this isn't really good for Wikimedia, but other corporate wikis or simply wikis that want their user list clear maybe want to have the autodeletion of the inactive accounts. Say that if a user hasn't accessed his account for e.g. 3 months (that could be flexible - customizable in the LocalSettings.php), the account could be deleted, but the user (talk) pages would still be intact. So basically, the user would have to be deleted from the database and since deleting really active users (the ones with many edits), similar to renaming them, isn't very safe, the autodeletion might refer only to accounts that have ~3000 edits. After that figure (or any else for that matter), the account could become undeletable. I see some possible problems with all of this, but it should/can be tested and I think that it might work.
First problem would be that deleting any row in the users table would be unsafe, as it leaves references to the user all over the place, which could cause all sorts of wonderful errors. Second issue is that you assume some sort of daemon/TSR which runs the software, which isn't the case. This couldn't be 100% automated; either it would need to be part of the index.php script (which increases server load) or you would need to use a maintenance script, which defeats your objective of the process being automated. It is a nice idea, but as it stands, it would be problematic.
OK. Maybe that is good. Since this vision cannot be run like a daemon, it doesn't necessarily have to be automated. There could be a special page e.g. Deleteinactive that would do the work upon starting it (and would be available to sysops only, naturally). As for the database, I don't know how to sort that out...
Deleting users permanently is not acceptable in many cases - this cannot be undone, also mentioned problems with references. So a better approach would be - disabling user accounts, so disabled user is not visible in user list, cannot login, but it is still visible in referenced places (history, etc), and this can be undone by reenabling a user.
I like the idea, Andrius. It's even better. Someone willing to do it? :)
Closing as a duplicate of bug 6397, which is more feasible. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 6397 ***
