Seahawk
Member
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As Evo said, the forum does periodically purge old accounts with low-to-no post counts... I honestly forget the frequency at which said purges run. Keep in mind too, much as Chii was saying... if we did frequent purges of unused/idle/banned names so that we could put those names back in to circulation, you'd run the risk of inheriting all the baggage of an old account. You may think a certain name is really cool, but what if the guy who had it before you was a complete jerk who was constantly being banned and was constantly making enemies on the forums? People would naturally assume you were him when you suddenly appeared using his old name. As part of my job handling forum name changes, I do on occasion remove accounts that have never logged on and are in "email verification pending" status... which means they were likely created using a bad email address and have never been activated for use. But other then that, even if an account is 4 years old, has one post, and hasn't logged on since 2007, I would still prefer not deleting it just to free up a name. It's always possible someone who is still an active player created that account to access the forums for a specific reason (like a bug report or whatnot) and just hasn't seen the need to log in since. Plus, from a far more pragmatic view, I'd prefer not to start getting into "Well, <so-and-so> has been idle for 8 months... can I have their name?" discussions every time someone requests a name change... and once you open the door to that, you can't easily close it again. Keep in mind as well, sometimes an account you see as idle may be kept around for a reason. For example, we have accounts created and names reserved for many of our NPCs to prevent impersonation or because we may someday want to use those names for our own purposes. Likewise, an account that is on a permanent ban ties up a name, but we don't want to delete the account because then we destroy all record of it, and we may need those records down the road. Unfortunately, it's a sad fact that when a community gets as big as ours has, the name you like won't always be available. It's been a LONG time since I've been able to register anywhere as "Seahawk" without having to add a number to the end or something...
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