Reichu wrote:Yup. We've got no motivation to delete any besides those (spam accounts aside).

If you did delete an account that had been used to post, would those posts disappear too?

And here I was starting to wonder if I had anything to worry about if I took longer than 2 years between visits.

Monk Ed wrote:If you did delete an account that had been used to post, would those posts disappear too?

No, they'd still be there but instead of anything to the left of the post it would just say "Anonymous". It would revert to the rendering of a topic where the user_id would be "-1". If phpbb was setup to allow posts made by users that aren't registered, they'd all show up as "Anonymous".

Obviously, that's a concern if, for whatever reason, a user with many posts had to be deleted. All of the posts would be disassociated and would be indiscernable from anyone else who had their account deleted.

Perhaps there should be one collective account (with an awesome name, of course) that all of these anonymous posts get filed under. It's an interesting idea.

This is a weakness of phpBB; the SMF forum software retains the names alongside posts made from deleted accounts (though you can no longer search for them, of course).

Nuclear Lunchbox wrote:Perhaps there should be one collective account (with an awesome name, of course) that all of these anonymous posts get filed under. It's an interesting idea.

It's not needed, we don't have any anonymous posts (unless they're in the graveyard) because we don't delete users with posts.