The upcoming week there will be database tweaks to improve the speed of the website. You'll probaly not notice anything of this, except (hopefully) the speedups.
Also, users that haven't pulsed for 18 months (note: it was a year before the last edit of this post) will be pruned from now on, to free up space and nicks!
News
Database tweaks and users prunes
Posted on 17th January 2006, 12:48:18
That means that our team is going to lose 375 members, and 75.287.354 keys :'(
Isn't it possible to rename the users who haven't pulsed for a year to a series of numbers so that the account can be saved for the team? Or a merge per team for those accounts to a "deleted user-accoutns"-account???
It's kinda not fair to just delete the accounts of these members who once participated in this project...
Teams consist of the contributions made by their users. Without users, a team is nothing. Having a team with all inactive users makes no sense.
This is also a nudge in the back for teams to keep their users active.
There are just too many inactive users at the moment. For those who would lose keys over this expiration; it'll happen to every team who has inactive users.
There are just too many inactive users at the moment.
I find the "deleted users-account"-account a good idea. I know that a team consist of users, and that there's no team without them, but just 'throwing away' a huge amount of keys for the team isn't fair. The inactive pulsers have typed for it, and that they're not doing this anymore won't say that the team doesn't have the right to have the keys.
I agree with The_Zeroorez
You could add 2 extra columns in the team-table that will contain the keys- and clicks-offset of deleted members. So every time an user get's deleted, his or her keys and clicks will be added to that column. In the statistics these columns could be added to the total keycount.
The solution to this problem for the team owners is simple. Don't add people to your team, that will not be staying around. Inactive users are a waste of space. You get a lot for free already, so its time some people quit their bitching already.
would it be possible for the teams to still be able to retain their keys for the inactive users that are facing deletion? Plus, say the user tried to pulse after this sort of deleting, would there be any way that the account would reinstate itself?
I think this is a great idea, new teams with active members should be stimulated. It also stimulates teams to find there old members and get them typing again.
It won't make such a difference at all, if the names are needed: give everyone who didn't pulse for a year (or 18 months) a code instead of their own nick. For the server space it won't make a huge differ either, what's it? A name, a key- and clickcount, the team, country and the date of the last pulse. It certainly will not be any more than 10 gig's.
And if server speed is a problem, you could put all the inactive accounts into one account for teams ye..
Perhaps it's just me, but I don't see how deleting a few inactive users can improve the performance of WhatPulse. If pruning members is in fact needed to keep things fast, there's something wrong in either the database model or the queries/software used to fetch and present the data on this website.
I think using server side caching for the WhatPulse website will improve performance a lot more then deleting a few megs of user data.
Actually, after all this, I think it is just a weak excuse to delete all inactive users.
Agreed, Zeroorez. Those users contributed to the team by submitting their amount of typed keys everytime. That they've lost interest doesn't mean you can go around pruning those accounts.
Ideas for inactive users:
6 months: Send an email, notify them that if they don't start pulsing again, their accountname will be changed to nickname|IA
12 months: Change nickname to nickname|IA
Ideas for freeing "space" (as if):
Delete > 6 month old users who have never (or only once) pulsed.
How often will this 18-month clean up be done? It says it's been over a year now, but how long before the pruning will happen again after this one is done?
Every week..
I don't see why this "active user deletion" issue is such a problem. Unless your team has been deliberately amassing inactive users, then your team should have just as many keys from inactive members (on a percentage basis) as any other WP team.
If your team has a lot of keys coming from inactive accounts, then your total count is inflated and should be brought down to include only the keys from active members in the interest of being fair to other teams.
Deleting inactive users doesn't seem to make a big difference. According to the users page, there are currently about 4,000 inactive users (ones who haven't pulsed since before July 19, 2004). That comes to about 500,000 keystrokes lost on average per team. Big teams will suffer, but I doubt that the rankings will change much.
"Oh noes our team will lose some members and keycounts and click counts"
I hope, no! I PRAY that wasted will "accidentally" delete Luelinks. For no conceivable reason I seem to have a personal vendetta against them.
As for losing members, big deal. It's more incentive to type more and click more
LUElinks has a lot of active users, and me being from LUElinks I 100% support this pruning
Seriously though, teams may lose a lot of members but lots of those members have little keys so I think the damage won't be large.
No, our damage will be less than what LUElinks has cheated.
Anyway, the damagew will be quite large for some teams. And I think the activity of LUElinks users is quite cheater-like, the last pulse of the last is @ 2004-08-20, followed by 2004-10-17. Even people with just 25 keys for example aren't that inactive.
The manager of whatpulse already checked for multiple accounts and didn't even find one. LUElinks has a close community and people don't leave as much because of that. We do not support cheating and do not tolerate it either.
Besides, i'm getting tired of people calling us cheaters just because we are in first place. If you really want to be back in first place I suggest you recruit more members or type more instead of crying about it.
crying is typing :>
The_Zeroorez
+1
You are right
Obviously, wasted thought this through. The whole deal isn't necessarily saving the database space (which I'm sure could be afforded - if it can't, there is something SERIOUSLY wrong), the problem is the people who come, pulse a billion keys with one pulse, and then don't pulse in forever. True, I am somewhat guilty of that (only because of a faulty connection), but to me, THOSE are the people who should be removed.
"THOSE"
I think removing all cheaters will save more nicks, database and keys that are not ment to be there...
What I don't understand is how on Earth is it possible for a human being to type 93000 keys in 4 minutes. RadarListener did... I'm amazed! Perhaps you can explain, cheater!
He is just a 1.5 bèta tester, and they can just pulse 2 pc's after eachother, without tinking of the avkps
More info + a cheater report topic on the Forums if you still don't believe him.
The_Zeroorez
You think that is too many cheaters?
i can't understand what for they did such things?
for me, Whatpulse - nice idea...but i don't try cheat there...and most users too...
Every cheater is one too much
agree
if whatpulse team will detect every cheater - respect!
"What I don't understand is how on Earth is it possible for a human being to type 93000 keys in 4 minutes. RadarListener did... I'm amazed! Perhaps you can explain, cheater!"
"He is just a 1.5 bèta tester, and they can just pulse 2 pc's after eachother, without tinking of the avkps
More info + a cheater report topic on the Forums if you still don't believe him."
There's your explanation.
I pulsed my laptop after my computer.
I can't quite see why people wanna cheat in this one. Is this a competition? Do you get a boost in your status if you place first in your team or place first on the personal stats?
I think it's good for the administrators to keep the site active and keep the pulsing active. I think it's actually quite good to pulse every now and then. I have the software pulse the server every x keys or every x clicks, so that I stay active.