LegRoom.net Account Cleanup

Submitted by jbreland on Mon, 07/07/2008 - 01:46

This website gets a lot of account registrations. Most of these are obvious spam accounts using fake e-mail addresses. Since e-mail confirmation is required on all new accounts, these accounts are never confirmed and therefore are never fully activated. I routinely run through the account list and delete these accounts to help keep things manageable. I also run through all of the new confirmed accounts every couple of weeks looking for obvious spam accounts that actually use a real e-mail address and remove these as well.

Since this website went live, that's pretty been the only account maintenance that I've done. At this point, 1 year and 4 months later, there are nearly 400 active accounts. This is after the obvious spam accounts were removed as described above. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these accounts have not been used at all since their initial creation. A lot of these accounts are spam accounts that use legitimate sounding names and e-mail addresses. A lot of them are also one-time use accounts: the user signs up, does whatever he wanted to do once, and then never returns (or at least never uses the account again).

Due to the large volume of inactive accounts, I decided to start cleaning up these old, unused accounts as well. For the first batch, I'm deleting all accounts that meet these two criteria:

  • the account was created more than six months ago
  • the account was last accessed more than six months ago

So, basically, any user that signed up for a LegRoom.net account more than six months ago and has not used the account since then has had his account deleted. After the first batch of deletions, the total account count dropped from nearly 400 to about 130. Much better. :-)

If you've been affected by this, the easiest solution would be to simply recreate your account, and login periodically to keep it active. I'll probably continue to do this on a semi-regular basis going forward. If you have any questions or complaints, feel free to either leave a comment or send me an e-mail.