currently lots of the players on ogs are just provisional players who didnt play any games. A lot of good usernames are taken by them. I would like OGS to have a deletion policy to free up some username space.
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I agree…I think you can ask a mod to delete an account and let you have the name but it seems a hassle when you could just have a rule like if no games played in six months the account gets deleted automatically.
It seems that creating a new account is not the biggest hurdle to that person playing go!
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I don’t agree with that. I don’t see why I couldn’t take a six month break because life got in the way. There’s probably a six month to a year break between live/in person go tournaments for instance in my country.
I have seen in the past people request the username of an inactive player (most likely not returning) and I think that account just gets renamed. I don’t think the username problem is that big, and unless you change your username regularly I doubt it affects the same user multiple times.
Accounts don’t get deleted properly as far as I know because games played between that player and other possibly still active players are kind of the property of both and are records of their rating - something to that extent.
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If there’s even 1 game (and there might be private games), the account can’t be deleted because it messes up game history for all players involved.
If there’s a specific username you want, maybe a mod can free it up.
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Also I agree with shinuito, six months is not long enough. I’d count the necessary time in years.
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I disagree with the 6 months too. Honestly if we had any similar rule, my account mighta been deleted at some point and if it was deleted I prob wouldn’t be here atp.
They could have some weird category thing for them but idk how that’d work
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No one said anything about accounts with games played. I don’t see the problem with an account that got created and played no games being deleted automatically after 6 months. Or less.
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I wonder how many frequent players have provisional accounts to lurk in dan games… 
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Accounts with no games maybe, what if you just make reviews or teach but don’t play games?
What if I just signed up to OGS to just make puzzles or want to use demo boards in a browser 
I think there’s things to consider before implementing an auto delete policy.
Provisional players though are broader than just players with zero games, typically I’m imagining a player with a ? as part of their rating.
Basically I can’t tell from the wording whether it’s really the case of hundreds of players with exactly zero games or an exaggeration with lots of players that have almost zero games.
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To all those in favour of deleting an account that is seemingly inactive for a certain period: how would you like it if your account was deleted for some reason?
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I feel several different things are being discussed here. To clarify again, the original poster said accounts with no games played.
Now, it’s true, maybe someone makes an account and doesn’t play, they just want to kibitz or do other things.
I’d agree with account deletion if and only if these two conditions are met:
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The account has zero games, reviews, tournaments created, puzzles created, groups created or any other kind of information that is relevant to the OGS community associated with it.
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The account hasn’t been logged in in some reasonable amount of time. People here argue that one month. However, I’d say up to one year.
In other words, when you can reasonably ascertain that the account was created, never used, and then forgotten about.
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So far as I know, no accounts are ever deleted, even the ones without games. The mods do occasionally get a request for a name on an old account. If the account is very old and inactive, it is made anonymous, and the name is given to the requester. In the cases I have seen, the accounts have been inactive for 4 or more years; I’m not sure where we would draw the line on that point. I doubt that the mod team would be in favor of anonymizing accounts after a fixed time of inactivity unless the process were fully automated. Otherwise it would create extra unnecessary work for us.
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OGS has the right (but not the obligation) to terminate an account.
In Terms of Service ( https://forums.online-go.com/tos ):
3. User Content License
User contributions are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Without limiting any of those representations or warranties, Online Go has the right (though not the obligation) to, in Online Go’s sole discretion (i) refuse or remove any content that, in Online Go’s reasonable opinion, violates any Online Go policy or is in any way harmful or objectionable, or (ii) terminate or deny access to and use of the Website to any individual or entity for any reason, in Online Go’s sole discretion. Online Go will have no obligation to provide a refund of any amounts previously paid.
EDIT: not specifically an answer to @Leira, but took the wrong reply.
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You can just add a _at the end of the name if you want that username or put some emoji in it.
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Backing up Conrad - I think we’re pretty reasonable at handing over obviously-disused account names that were never invested in.
I can’t imagine we’d hand over an account name that had a significant number of games, no matter how old, because that is a historical record associated with that person’s identifier of the time. For all we know they may look back over it nostalgically, proudly or whatever… just because they aren’t playing doesn’t mean they no longer care, or won’t do.
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But they use their accounts to watch other people play for reviews or play with other ppl but make it private.
Are you not happy with your name? What is wrong with the name bagelfan?
If you tell us what you look for in another name, I am sure that this creative go community will come up with a lot of suggestion for a new name.
(I know I would share my creativity with you.)
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I wasn’t exaggerating, but I don’t know for sure the number of those players so maybe I’m wrong 
Well, I don’t even eat bagels anymore…
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good luck finding another name.