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Question for free website maintainers: how long would you wait before deleting new accounts that hadn't been logged into since the day they were created and showed no other engagement with your site?
Context: I'm getting lots of spam accounts (about a dozen a day). I can eliminate the majority of them using keyword filters, but they seem to be created by hand (e.g. human tests don't help), and are still coming even after I've blocked URLs and other contact info from user profiles.
The most common spam is for Vietnamese gambling sites, but I've had some boring stuff, like U.S. dentists, and some positively Shakespearean stuff, like cockfighting.
@lil5@social.linux.pizza@david_megginson depends on how healthy your server stats are, on a good day 6 months.
@lil5 Thanks! I don't care so much about server stats any more -- I don't run Google ads or analytics, and run this site only as a public service for community-maintained open aviation data, so 6 months would work for me.
@lil5@social.linux.pizza@david_megginson I meant RAM/CPU/Disk space usage
@lil5 Ah. They're not a problem, and unused accounts take up negligible space.
@david_megginson for context, what resources are we talking? Do you allocate a container with microservices for them or is it like one database row in the users table?
Because that swings the poll answer from minutes to probably never
@luc One row per member. But my issue is that there are spam accounts that are appearing as public profiles as well as a lot of simply stale, inactive accounts.
@david_megginson I'm not a free website maintainer, so I don't want to vote in the poll. But my thoughts:
They're taking up basically zero space on-disk or in-database, so I wouldn't delete them. If they're clogging up queries, I might add clauses to my queries to by-default only return accounts with activity, and maybe add a UI option for "Include abandoned accounts in search" or some such.
And if they're not even coming up in searches? 
No worries, screw it, ignore 'em.