In Delete old, unloved, users I argued that we should delete unloved users because it's a fairly good way of getting rid of those whose sole purpose is spam, as per Is spam in the "about me" field a reason to worry?.
However, this was status-completed back in prehistoric times and far more harshly than I would have done; can't complain! Shog9 wrote in his answer and a comment that the number of users that are deleted each iteration is capped:
Note that due to the extreme number of qualifying accounts on Stack Overflow, only a fraction of these actually get deleted on each pass.
... Yes, @Ben. I forget the number, but it is capped.
As there are 8,404,010 (up from 237,625 in 2012) who reach the minimum qualifying criteria 1 can this now be done better? This can also be read as I don't believe this is "completed" if there's this number of users who qualify.
By better I mean can we do one of:
- Prioritise those who've added a website or About Me (1,401,281), thereby getting rid of the only users who both fit the criteria and are capable of spamming via these fields.
- Prioritise those who've had posts deleted, and therefore have contributed detrimentally to the site.
- Delete more users each time the script is run; or run the script more regularly.
1. 1 reputation, not visited for 6 months and no posts - I can't test for other accounts so it's less than this but for cookie based accounts the minimum reputation is higher so this is roughly accurate.