Currently when a GM posts a game over on Players Wanted, the site lists other games they run or past games they've run.  I really like that, it gives me a feel for whether the GM sticks with their games or not (we have some members who love to start games, but not actually run them).

But the past games only lists games that are currently in the Deleted Games area, it doesn't list games that have been purged from the site.

It would be very handy (for me at least) if the site kept the game's title and number of posts so that a GM's history could show.  That way if a GM had a long-running game years ago, I could see that they're the sort of GM who keeps with their game.

Granted we can't get that history back, but going forward it would be useful.

The list of other games that the GM runs, or has run, is generated by checking the current database.

Once the game is deleted, all record of it is gone from the database, so it can't be displayed as part of the list (which updates when you refresh the page).

Long-running games don't get purged for a long time.  If they had a long-running game, say, two years ago, that will still be in the Deleted section.  Depending on your definition of `long-running', I suppose, but I just had one vanish two days ago that was deleted, I believe, at the start of 2012, so that was almost four years.

If it's the kind of GM who does that, they'll probably have new, more relevant, long-running games by the time you're looking -- and if someone had a long-running game that ended five years ago, hasn't run anything much since, and is just starting up again, I'm not sure that that long-ago game is still very relevant.

Short-run games get purged much faster, but if you have a GM who tosses out six new game ideas a month and then deletes them all two weeks in, and the system keeps track of all of their games from the beginning of -- oh, alright, from December 3rd, 2015, say (because Jase is awesome!) -- then by next April, that's going to be a crazy long list on everything they do.  And let's say they stop doing that, take a year off, settle down, and come back with a fresh outlook on GMing... that history would be with them forever.

With the way purging works, I think it's set.. at least near-perfectly, for giving a solid, relevant, history and current-standing for a GM, without trapping them forever with past mistakes.

It may just be me, then, but I had a game I ran a couple of years ago that has since been purged so doesn't show up in my list when people are looking at my game advertisements.

And Bigbadron, I'm aware it isn't stored in the database.  That was the suggestion, that the title and number of posts for future purged games be stored in the database so they can be queried on that list.

As Utsukushi said, that would use a lot of system resources to store years-old dead information, which may, or may not, be relevant.

Is there really any point in storing the names and post counts for thirty or forty games that were once run by a GM who hasn't been seen on RPoL for six or seven years?

Probably not.  But I obviously thought there was a point to storing them for currently active GMs (my original use case) for whom the information might be relevant.

The system resources required would be minimal compared to the current size of the database.  Or to look at it another way, if you purge all but 99% of a game's data, you're still recovering an awful lot of the space for new games.

And a purging based on the GM's activity level could certainly be used to keep the information relevant.

If the actual feature isn't of interest to anyone else, that's fine, but a blanket dismissal based on system resources doesn't seem like it'll encourage future suggestions.

Except that the system does not distinguish between "currently active" and "inactive" users.  Basically, since accounts are never deleted, and any user can, potentially, come back to the site at any time, then ALL accounts are classed as active.

The last login time is kept for each user, so that can be used to create a filter for "inactive" accounts.  Or more accurately, I guess, accounts for whom a record of past games is no longer relevant.

These are technical details that are easily solved, if the feature itself is something that seems to have value.

I'm not sure how games are deleted and then purged so it's hard to comment.

Are games only deleted by the creator, can moderators delete them, or is it done automatically for inactive games?

How often is a purge done?  Is it automated or manual?

Overall I'm kinda siding with what Utsukushi says. I'm more interested in recent activity than old activity so old, deleted games are of less interest.  But I see the point in keeping the metadata, especially since with a quick check of a dozen or so GMs, the info for deleted games does not even go back 2 years.

I'd like to see is when games were started too.  A game with 2000 posts started a year ago and still going vs a game with 2000 posts started 5 years ago and still going are different things.

On the flip side, how about the GM being able to access metadata on someone who is requesting access.  Knowing what games categories they have played in, how many posts they made and so on could be helpful.
This message was last edited by the user at 21:53, Wed 02 Dec 2015.

Bigbadron can give more details, but my understanding is that at some point a moderator runs a script that moves games with no activity for some amount of time (no idea how long that needs to be) to the Deleted Games list.

At some later point those are purged, but I don't know how that decision is made.  I do know that a game I stopped running a couple of years ago is no longer there.  Maybe when new games are moved to Deleted Games old ones there are also finally deleted from the system?

It's been done roughly once a year for the last 3 years.