The Great Purge

[Cthulhu]

DOOOM!

So one of the things I'd like to do before moving to Xf is to clean up some shit accounts and the Junkyard, where we dump deleted posts / threads from spambots.

I've done a quick search in the user list and at the moment, we have 1414 users in the Spambot group (a special category of banned users that you have to manually select in the 'delete post as spam' flow - we can be pretty sure that these all tried to make a post, but were caught by the anti spam system and manually banned by staff) and 427 users in the 'banned' usergroup, who, looking at the usernames and e-mail addresses, are mostly spambots as well - although there are some duplicate accounts from banned users as well. 295 of those have 0 posts.

I propose the following:

* We clear out the Junkyard, go through it to check for non-spambot threads and move those to an archive junkyard section of sorts for future references, then hard delete the leftover spam threads.
* Recalculate post counts - that way, spambots who have had their posts deleted will show up as having 0 posts.
* Move banned users with 0 posts to the Spambot usergroup
* Nuke all users in the Spambot usergroup from orbit. Hard delete, etc.

This last step will also nuke some duplicate accounts from orbit (from some repeat undesireables); I won't grieve for those accounts being gone, but maybe we should put in the extra effort and sift those out first, IDK. I don't think those users would try to register with those same e-mail accounts again, and if they did we can just ban them again.

I did another search though, all accounts with 0 posts - there's 9165 of those, or like 85% of our userbase. A quick glance at the list shows a lot of bot accounts (with usernames like 76n9n072 and addamsmith and ADMINISTRATOR) and some legitimate users. 9088 of those have not been active / logged in at all this year. With those we can do a few things I think:

* Leave them, it'd suck to see our 'registered user' counter go down to about a thousand
* Sift through them and look for legitimate looking user accounts, removing the obvious bot accounts
* Nuke them all from orbit

Thoughts / opinions / feelings / n00dz?

[f a n c y]

I say nuke’em. Sorting through the banned group and grouping the obvious bots with spam sounds reasonable, too. Love a good purge. (｡･ω･｡)

[Ghost X]

The Great Purge would easily be better than the film franchise. So, if shit hits the fan, there is that.

I can't see any downsides. If there are lurkers who lurk more irregularly than once per year, I can't get into the mind of such a lurker, so I can't give you any insight, but if I were them, and I were really desperate, I'd just make another account .

[Lex]

Re: accounts with 0 posts (that are not banned), I think we should just leave them. There's no real way to know what's a bot and what's a lurker. I get that the names can be a giveaway but even then it'd be shitty for someone to try to sign into their account with the funny name only to find out their account had been deleted for no reason

Should we even be deleting the accounts in the spambot usergroup? Doesn't having them there stop them from signing up again? If not I'm in favour of nuking (and all spambot posts).

Junkyard is going to be a nightmare because all deleted threads go there ;-;

[Cthulhu]

Nah, spambot accounts are one-time spam-and-forget groups, and the e-mail addresses associated with them probably get nuked from orbit by hotmail et al too if they're associated with spam - although granted, I'm not sure about that.

Re: junkyard, it should be doable to set up a flow where you can view a hundred threads in the list at a time, mark them all, unmark the non-spam threads.

[BforBrigitta]

I agree. Get rid of them. If they were a regular lurker, they'd make a new account and it wouldn't be a problem even if it was with the same email address, would it?

A proper clean slate sounds well worth it. With new FF content and impending Remake news we're sure to generate more activity and attract more new (human) members, no?

[ForceStealer]

I guess the only utility to keeping banned dupes would be to be able to recognize them in the future, but I don't think that's worth the time or effort. We basically know who the potential dupers are at this point anyway, haha.

And yeah, the forums are going to look different enough that a lurker may not think twice about making a new account anyway.

[Cthulhu]

And hopefully Xf has better anti-spam mechanics which can help prevent spambots from registering in the first place. relevant help page. We can at least set up the Q&A anti spam system to be FFVII relevant, . (right now we have a 'select the correct image' system, which I guess has helped a bit :p )

[Flare]

I’m with Fancy on this, cleaning those up sounds fantastic. Like I’d rather have 1k accounts here that are real people (for example) than have 10k which are mostly spam and junk

[lithiumkatana17]

I say we nuke 'em. It'll suck to see our member count go down, but even most lurkers come out of the woodworks once in a while. We're trying to have an active community here, and people lurking around (possibly stealing content ideas from us) is unsettling.

DO IT YOP. FGJ

[Obsidian Fire]

I'd say nuke 'em. We've been on the internets for 10+ years. Getting rid of old accounts (that never post) from who-knows-when needs to be done sometime. Might as well be now.

[Strangelove]

why stop at just spambots

why not everything

none are free of sin

(j/k don't delete everything)

[Mr. Ite]

[Strangelove]

[Kionae]