OSDev.org

The ones who only post once every 4 years aren't the troublesome ones.

iansjack wrote:The ones who only post once every 4 years aren't the troublesome ones.

Well, I said: Those who did post nothing, not once! I think these "sleeping" accounts are used for spam.

Greetings
Peter

PeterX wrote:Well, I said: Those who did post nothing, not once! I think these "sleeping" accounts are used for spam.

Or are used for lurking. Though we can just look at the last login time, so that is easy to tell apart. In the alternative, most of these accounts are going to be what we in Germany call "Karteileichen", i.e. people that are still on file but not actually part of the group anymore. Maybe they lost interest, or they lost the password and failed to recover it, or they opened alternative accounts, or maybe they died (or had a plane crash in Nigeria and lost their memory or something). That is the by far most likely explanation, so I'm going with it. Major amounts of sleeper spam accounts are rather unlikely.

Though that means being deleted isn't a detriment to them. Maybe make it so that accounts that have been inactive for a while must do what new users must do now? That would allow lurkers to continue lurking and wouldn't outright remove anyone from the site, and would prevent spam sleepers from doing their work.

PeterX wrote:

iansjack wrote:The ones who only post once every 4 years aren't the troublesome ones.

Well, I said: Those who did post nothing, not once! I think these "sleeping" accounts are used for spam.

Greetings
Peter

An account that never posts is a peculiarly inefficient source of Spam.

iansjack wrote:

PeterX wrote:

iansjack wrote:The ones who only post once every 4 years aren't the troublesome ones.

Well, I said: Those who did post nothing, not once! I think these "sleeping" accounts are used for spam.

Greetings
Peter

An account that never posts is a peculiarly inefficient source of Spam.

Yes, right, but you know what I mean: Before they post spam, they stay passive a long time. That was the case with the last spam issue.

It sounds extremely unlikely to me that, on a small forum like this, spammers would be planning four years in advance. But I'm sure the mods will know if this is really happening.

@iansjack, the last spam wave was from sleeper accounts that were 1 year old. This is a hard thing. Maybe the mods should add all members with zero posts to the Newly Registered Users group? That would make their posts go through the moderation queue.

Who has awoken me from my slumber?

Jokes aside, mine is one of those old-ish low-activity accounts but I lurk a couple of times a week.

I don't have time nor will to osdev right now (hobbies come and go) but I plan to return at one point in the future and it will be good if I'll be able to use my account when the time comes

Cheers

P.S. Just checked, my previous post is seven years old XD

Right, I don't think deleting inactive accounts is the right move at all. I think maybe readding them to moderation queue would be better.

nexos wrote:Right, I don't think deleting inactive accounts is the right move at all. I think maybe readding them to moderation queue would be better.

That would be a good solution I think. It would both stop spammers and keep real OSdevers accounts.