Have you noticed the impressive growth in the number of participants on the 19x19 Global Ladder? If you feel more and more difficult to stay in the top 100 or even 200, no wonder, look at the crowd climbing under you to kick you down.
More and more challenging indeed to keep in place, let alone climbing higher. Good news or bad news?
When you have a club where doors allow only entering, no wonder that the number of people is always increasing! 
FTR, most of the time the auto drop-out feature works properly… AFAIAA, the players “stuck” in ladders are by far the minority
But they are steadily increasing 
Well, because they can’t decrease…
But why would anyone even want to leave the 19x19 sitewide ladder? 
Says the guy who was once on the ladder and has since left 
Hum. On my ladder page I see a button with the option “Drop out from ladder”. Is not this working?
[edited] : Well, looking at the thread you point to, it does not seem to… But people stuck on the ladder against their will should slowly drift to the bottom if they don’t answer to challenges, right?
Like Sisyphus, you might want to start again from the bottom once in a while, when you don’t progress anymore. I did that once, it took me about six months to get back to the top 200. That was fun, I’ll do it again soon I guess, if I can, that is …
As far as I’m allowed (to) admit? 
Right.
Veeeeeeeery slowly. 
I did it too. It’s my second time.
Last time I was able to climb more steps. I went to the top 50 if I recall correctly.
Now I struggle to stay in the top 100.
He’s onto us 
There are over 3,500 players in the ladder now.
The highest SDK is daoducvuminh 3k, at #14.
The highest DDK is MicrMacr 11k, at #107.
I mean now that the timeouts are fixed I kind of expect it to finally start going back down, assuming everyone hasn’t just modified their behaviour to only challenge people that are active.
That is either only challenge people with ongoing games or actually checking if the player has played a game in recent months.
Not sure I understand. The other way round, if you want a quick and dirty way up, challenge players who have not been active lately, and likely to time out. The excuse for such a behaviour is that you clean the ladder from inactive players. 
.
There used to be a bug where losing by timeout wouldn’t drop you or promote your opponent.
Yes I knew that, I’d stumbled upon such cases. What I don’t understand is the way it can impact some players’ behaviour. Depends if you want to climb up by all means, or play interesting games. That’s why I proposed a different strategy.
You proposed targeting people you suspect will timeout. I explained why this behaviour would be trained out of people, as timeouts were not rewarding ladder rank promotions during the bug.
Due to this, users would be trained to only target active users, who are less likely to timeout, and thus promotion is possible.
OK, I see. The behaviour you mention is an old one, not a new one based on the bug correction. That’s why we talked passed each other.
BTW when did this correction happen? I just had my son on the phone, who is also on the ladder, who told me that he had a case not long ago (like a week) where his challenged player was Black and timed out before the first move, and the game was just cancelled. Is that still the case?
The game being cancelled is correct behaviour for any ranked game with <2 moves.
The key identifiers (which should no longer be happening, I forget for how long now) are that the loser would stay on the ladder and that the winner would not change rank position.
OK I did not know this rule, thanks. So even if the challenger is Black and plays first move, if White ignores the challenge altogether the game is cancelled. Fair enough, but in that case, the strategy I propose to clean the ladder from inactive players does not work. 
Cancellation only has regard to whether the game counts towards rating points or not. Losing by timeout should drop a user from the ladder, whether the game was cancelled or not.
Ha! Very subtle rules indeed. I wonder how many ladder players are aware of all this (now I am, but it took me to jump in this discussion).