Regarding your related question, the engine automatically deletes abandoned accounts.
When is it safe to declare an account abandoned? We came up with these two rules of thumb. If..
- the user has not visited the site in six months AND
- the user has not done anything of significance, ever
.. their accounts are effectively abandoned. With that in mind:
if the user has not visited the site in six months AND
the user has not done anything of significance, ever .. their accounts are effectively abandoned.
We delete cookie-based unregistered accounts when:
- The user has not visited Stack Overflow in six months AND
- The user has less than 50 reputation, and no visible (not-deleted) posts
We delete OpenID registered accounts when:
- The user has not visited Stack Overflow in six months AND
- The user has only 1 reputation, no visible posts, and no other accounts on the network
