Inactive Members

We have thousands of members who post again after gaps of several years, so we don't delete inactive accounts automatically.

There's no explicit requirement to delete inactive users, but we're only supposed to keep data we have good reason to keep - which might create an implicit requirement to delete them. Some other sites do delete inactive accounts, e.g. after a year. Twitter had some publicity because it was deleting inactive accounts, some of which belonged to people who had died; some people objected because they wanted the accounts to continue as a kind of memorial.

We currently delete the personal data of inactive users who:

• were added at least six months ago
• are not on any communities
• have not logged in for six months
• are not on the spammer list
• have no mod notes
• have no logs for six months

This wasn't implemented for users who were still on communities in the first wave of GDPR, because:

• of concerns about volunteers reacting badly to "the system" removing "their" users, and
• it's hard to do this while retaining the statistical information we need - we'd have to keep "ghost" deleted users on the communities, which would confuse people.

These are practical reasons, but they might not be good reasons. We know some people come back after long gaps, which is potentially a good reason to keep accounts.

Why six months?

One of the main reasons for the six-month cut-off is spam reputation. Email providers spot when you send to old, inactive mailboxes, or send mail that people don't read or engage with - if you do that, they judge you more likely to be a spammer who's grabbed a list of email addresses from somewhere. Then they mark your mail as spam more often, which is bad for everyone.

Sending emails for six months of inactivity is longer than many providers recommend - three months would be safer, but we think that's too short for Freegle. That's why we ask people to visit the site from time to time, and stop sending mail if they don't.

How long do people really come back after?

In August 2021, Edward wrote a script to look for users with a long gap between posts, prompted by a discussion on the Development Group.

• The record holder posted again after a gap of about nine years - but that was someone in Norfolk, a special case because they may have been prompted to return when we moved platform.
• Ignoring Norfolk, there's someone in Brighton who was quite active in January 2016, then went quiet until August 2021, when they became active again - a gap of five and a half years.
• Around 7,000 users have posted again after a gap of three years.

Given this, it didn't seem right to start automatically deleting inactive accounts that are still on communities - though volunteers can manually do this if they choose.

Links

• ModTools
• Housekeeping