Question and a Thought about accounts

I don't see any reason not to remove aged inactive accounts. To keep the numbers up, it only needs to keep a count of the removed ones, and add it.

Database queries take longer to process on large databases than on small ones, so removing the assets, etc. of dead accounts would improve performance, imo.

That was Bradley you were talking about, and I think you were unfair. A person can be dead against bots, for instance, and still think that there are very of them in SL (Bradley didn't say "very few" - I said it, to make the point).

I don't know where people get their bot percentages from, and I can't dispute them, but I do believe that they are *very* wild guestimates that can't be substantiated.

Not really. Unless you're talking about orders of magnitude difference in size, the amount of data in a database has, for all practical purposes, no effect on the efficency of the database. Communications latency, caching strategy, and index architecture all impact effiency far more than the database size.

Hit it right on the proverbial nose. While its not helping the servers with carrying the load of the inactive avatars and their inventories, the large number of residents looks good to investors and therefore brings in money that never gets put towards making the grid run better.

When I first joined SL, the basic accounts had a deadline, which was three months after they were started, you either paid or your account was terminated. It sucks that they dont bother to trim the fat and that at least half of the population is bots and/or campers that never log on, but all LL sees is the dollar signs in their eyes.

Because cleaning up (basic) residents + inventories doesn't really change the amount of stuff on the asset servers.

All items are divided between an entry in the inventories databases, which is a reference to an asset on the asset server.
These databases are separated too. (Not all in one big database, so when you log in you get your inventory from a specific database which holds a specific number of accounts.)
The inventories databases aren't what's causing lag/network issues etc.

The huge amount of stuff on the asset servers is. Several dozens/hundreds of terabytes of objects, sounds, textures etc. which need to be available to everybody on the grid everywhere.

The only way that an asset can be deleted, is, if all the references to it from the sims where it's rezzed, or inventories where of people 'owning' one are gone. (more or less, there are some extra rules causing items which are never 'accessed' to be eventually deleted too.)

Most (old) basic members (esp. the large group of people logging in once or twice and never coming back) probably don't have that big an amount of unique items. Meaning that pruning these accounts hardly makes a dent in the amount of assets which can be removed from the asset database.


But feel free to turn it into another attack on LL, I don't mind

There used to be a 9.99 fee to downgrade your account from premium I believe; they may have changed this recently...not sure...

Interestingly enough, I happened to go to a Linden Meeting yesterday, and the subject was recycling accounts, and account names. It seems LL is indeed considering removal of inactive accounts. However, the idea of recycling old names had many a bit bothered, due to the obvious issues (inheriting a bad reputation from the previous owner, etc). They also were discussing allowing custom first and last names. I think they were just putting out feelers to see what people thought, and how much people would pay for the service. But interesting never the less.

Hum.......really that would be a intersting thought if they did. They had this in place becayse people use to canncel accounts and get newbie status to get more referals bonus and have the repick money trees. Those Money tree hunters use to do this on a daily bases.