bloo777 wrote:

How about cleaning up some user accounts?
There is plenty of "dead" account, who registered, logged in once, never wrote anything, or haven't added anything to the database. I think those account only slow down the database. Besides userlist would be much more viewable without all those "ghosts".
How about deleting accounts that don't have any posts/items/recycles/compounds and haven't logged in during the last half of year? Of course fake compounds/recycles/items count as zero. It's more of a question to Scott and all of the admins/mods. What do you think about it?

I spoke with Scott a while back about deleting some of the avatars because there are people that add 5 or so avatars to the site then choose 1 then a little while later they add 5 more and choose another one. I thought that was a lot of space that was wasted just to put avatars that no one is using. If I remember correctly Scott said the database is still relatively young and so we still have plenty of space that we don't need to worry about that right now.
The reason the site gets slow at times is when there is excessive searching going on. I don't remember how everything works but basically after some time there is a build up of information from all the searches and it causes the site to slow down from all the information. It's just a simple thing of emptying out all this information for the site to run smoothly again. scott said he was going to look at something to automatically dump the information after so long. I don't know if he did that yet or how that is going.
Another problem with deleteing the old users is that if someone sent a PM to a user and we delete the account the PM stays in the other users inbox and when the 2nd user goes to access their PM's the website cannot link the message with a profile so it creates an error message. Scott was going to look into editing this so if an account is deleted all of the information from that profile is deleted not just the posts.

I think it would be a good idea eventually to delete the old profiles but there are problems right now. Once we get everything fixed then I wouldn't mind it. According to Scott we have enough room on the server though. So I don't think we really need to worry about it at the moment.