As you can imagine, we have a large number of users who essentially opened an account, never did anything, forgot they created an account and stopped visiting the site.
Rather than holding on to that data forever, we plan to delete an account if a user:
- hasn't visited the site in the last two years
- and never asked or answered a question
- and has a reputation of 1
- and doesn't have a Developer Story or hasn't applied to a job or job search status ≠ actively looking
- and hasn't opened or clicked any promotional email in the last year
- and hasn't engaged in any other activity, such as edits, voting, bounties, etc.
As you can see, we are really targeting users who really, truly don't use our site. In fact, while building the query for the purge, we discovered that most of the impacted users fall into the tech-debt category: 2 out of 3 were imports from our 2011 move to network-wide single sign-on.
We will not notify affected users because there is no easy action they can take to reactivate their existing accounts. It will be easier for them to just create a new account from scratch if they ever decide again that they would like to be a registered member.
All users who matched this criteria as of June 2018 were deleted as part of a batch process. However, we did not reinstate automatic deletion. We may continue to do mass deletions like this as batches in the future.