Friend's account got deleted

[shinta|hikari]

My friend's GW account seems to have been deleted.

His username is Zephyranthes. He just found out that he cannot log in, so I checked the member list and his name is missing.

What happened?

[complich8]

As part of a big spam-fighting bot-fighting seo-optimizer-killing cleanup effort over the last several days, I purged somewhere on the order of 4000 accounts with zero post count, somewhat regardless of their last login.

Looking at my backup copy of the db, it looks like that account had zero posts, so would have been caught up in that process.

Normally I'd expect him to just re-register, but until I can do some other work on the registration process to make it harder for bots to register, I've got new registrations disabled. And until we're off the spam lists, email validation to reputable domains wouldn't work anyway.

The good news is that I can bypass that and just administratively create an account for him based on info I can pull from backups, and artificially goose his post count so avoid having that happen again in the future.

The bad news is that it's not so trivial to restore thread subscriptions, avatar/profile images, etc.

Also, people don't show up on memberlist with less than 5 posts... an anti-SEOspam technique I've had in place for a couple years.

[shinta|hikari]

Thanks! He just told me it got restored.

[Zephyranthes]

Thanks for restoring my account.

[Buffalobiian]

If anyone else's account got purged and wants it reactivated, the best way to contact us at the moment (since the emailing function is down for now) is to visit us at our chatroom: http://www.gotwoot.net/irc/

It requires installing the java tidbit to work (there'll be security warnings like any other web-install tool.. I can vouch that it's safe. ;) ). Just tell us your account name and we'll have a look into it.

No one might actually talk to you on the channel if we're away.. but that's fine. Someone's logs would hopefully pick it up. If you don't see anything after a day or two.. maybe try again?

Sorry if you got caught in the crossfire against bots. :(

[Sapphire]

As part of a big spam-fighting bot-fighting seo-optimizer-killing cleanup effort over the last several days, I purged somewhere on the order of 4000 accounts with zero post count, somewhat regardless of their last login.

Looking at my backup copy of the db, it looks like that account had zero posts, so would have been caught up in that process.

Normally I'd expect him to just re-register, but until I can do some other work on the registration process to make it harder for bots to register, I've got new registrations disabled. And until we're off the spam lists, email validation to reputable domains wouldn't work anyway.

The good news is that I can bypass that and just administratively create an account for him based on info I can pull from backups, and artificially goose his post count so avoid having that happen again in the future.

The bad news is that it's not so trivial to restore thread subscriptions, avatar/profile images, etc.

Also, people don't show up on memberlist with less than 5 posts... an anti-SEOspam technique I've had in place for a couple years.

Thanks for the update! It's good to know that this place's squeaky parts are still being oiled.

[Sapphire]

On another note, is there an easy way to make the activities tab go away on profiles?

[Alhuin]

On another note, is there an easy way to make the activities tab go away on profiles?

On that note, I've noticed several other changes over the past couple days with user settings. Could it be time for another "Update" announcement? Or were they not part of some bigger picture?

[Abdula]

The changes are nice and the activities tab is actually very convenient.

[Buffalobiian]

On another note, is there an easy way to make the activities tab go away on profiles?

That would be an admin job. Note that the activities tab shows the activities of the user as well as their "friends". It is only visible to members (non members and google searchers shouldn't be able to see it). If you're "invisible" as a user, it's probably not visible to other members either.

There was indeed an update a few weeks ago. I'm not sure we know the exact features that were introduced/removed/patched though. :P