This would be helpful mainly to curators and staff, and maybe to the performance of the site as it grows. Accounts meeting the “never active” category would have: 0 observations AND 0 identifications AND 0 comments AND 0 other created content such as projects, places, journal posts, etc., (EXC…

I don’t understand what benefit this would confer. It wouldn’t stop people from creating new spam and it wouldn’t hide old spam that isn’t already hidden. It also adds the small cost of confusing people who know they created an account 5 years ago and are confused about why they can’t sign in. On to…

Thanks @kueda for the perspective from the technical end of things. I’m just going by what I see on the site during spam curation. I’ve gotten back to about August 27, 2018, in flagging spam accounts, and before that date there are still tons of them in there and potentially visible, that haven’t …

[image] jdmore: that haven’t (yet) been suspended or otherwise “hidden.” Currently all user profiles are hidden until the account has been marked as “not a spammer.” You can test this by viewing a spammy account while signed out. [image] jdmore: Have there been any examples of spammers u…

[image] kueda: Currently all user profiles are hidden until the account has been marked as “not a spammer.” Good point, and I knew that too! So I guess that begs the question, is there even any need for curators to actively find and flag the new spam accounts as they pop up?

I have a couple of relatives who have created iNaturalist accounts just to follow me, so they can get a daily email linking to the observations I’ve made. I think they meet all your criteria for deletion, including not having logged in for 2 years, yet are still using their iNaturalist account regul…

How can they use their iNaturalist account regularly without logging in?

My mom does the same thing. :) She gets emails related to my activity but only sometimes opens the website to view more detail.

Ah, got it, thanks. So there would be additional checks needed before being able to say that an account is truly unused. Still doable, but based on the rest of the feedback so far, doesn’t seem like there is much need for it. I’m still hoping for an answer on whether there is even any need for cu…

It doesn’t sound like this will be implemented, so maybe we should close it? I moved the spam question here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/why-mark-spam-accounts-as-spam/1206

Automatically delete "never active" accounts after 2 years

Feature Requests

susanhewitt March 1, 2019, 4:49pm 2

Sounds totally reasonable to me.

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Why mark spam accounts as spam? Curators question	16	1917	June 30, 2019
Inactive Account Deletion for Username General	9	469	March 23, 2024
Spammers now creating observations Curators	70	4303	November 21, 2019
Automatically remove the profile bio spam mask after user makes a certain number of identifications Feature Requests	6	487	August 12, 2024
Spam accounts - enhance users "Identifications" page to manage deleted content Feature Requests	39	2449	April 7, 2024

Automatically delete "never active" accounts after 2 years

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