Folding Forum

Do they ever remove inactive accounts or teams ?
If so how long would an inactive account stay in the system ?
How long would an inactive team stay in the system ?

To my knowledge Stanford has never removed any person or team from their database for inactivity reasons. My team has been running since very early and we have a whole bunch of people (actually strangers for we have no idea where they came from) with 1 WU completed and 0 points, and they have never been removed even though they've been there around 7+ years with no activity.

So my answer is forever. People or teams don't get removed unless they've done some very serious EULA violations.

7 years, Wow, looks like they would do some house cleaning every 5 years at least.

The policy is that once points are added to the database, no changes are made. They're following their own policy.

The only way to clean house would be to close out the old database and start everybody from zero again, and that would cause a great uproar. I've still got the points I earned for Genome@home on an Intel 386.

P5-133XL wrote:My team has been running since very early

If your team has been around so long, why is your team # 10047 ? My team is # 4.

There are about 200,000 teams IIRC. #10,000 would be an early team.

I'd prune teams once a year. No activity in the preceding 12 months, it's removed from the roster.

It's a better use of computer resources.

Its just a database... Inactive teams must use 60kb of space maybe.... Its not like its using resources really.

No, most the teams are inactive. There are less than 4k that made any points in the last week out of 200k, but I'm not sure how many have been inactive all through 2010. 4k out of 200k is 2% activity this week.

Hopefully when they transmit or store team data, they only transmit/store new info, not the entire list.

It's not like they have to throw away the data (pseudocode):

Function recordNewPoints (teamID, Points)
Search CurrentDatabase (teamID)
If NULL then Reactivate(teamID, Points)
...

Probably 30 lines of code max depending on the language.

Like at work, I have two databases. One covers 3 years. If a search comes up null, the other covers 17 years. I don't throw away data, but I don't move or search stuff that is inactive. Last year, I had no "old" searches, but the info is there just in case.

What got me to wondering about this was I just recently started. I don't think I have been hitting it hot and heavy really but I have already climbed into the top 200,000. That just looks odd.
It would probably help the other sites that keep stats, if they purged anything over 5 years with no activity, not to mention the processing time, bulk of data and network usage on the Folding@home network.
It could be put in archive if anyone wanted to revive there old team and user info.

Qinsp wrote: There are less than 4k that made any points in the last week out of 200k, but I'm not sure how many have been inactive all through 2010. 4k out of 200k is 2% activity this week.

Some of us old and poor contributers can take a week to do a WU!

If people have used their hard earned cash to contribute to Folding@home then it seems a bit mean to wipe away their contribution.