The Great Purge of 2020

A few days ago I purged over 200k inactive user accounts, in the first significant purge since I've been here, and perhaps the first purge to happen in a very long time. Like so many things around atWar, this is not something most people would even be aware of, and yet it really needed to be dealt with for several reasons. If you want to know the story behind this, read on...

Before I pulled the trigger to start the purge, atWar had amassed 871,137 user accounts (this was as of 1/16/2020). If all these accounts were active, atWar would be thriving so much we'd probably require several servers to handle all the traffic. But as you all know, that unfortunately isn't the case right now. A lot of those accounts are inactive, and a lot of those accounts are not even real users -- just spam. All that adds up to a lot of data stored, and a lot of server resources being used, sifting through a lot of useless records in order to find anything.

The other main reason to clean this up now is to prepare for doing email marketing. As any email marketer will tell you, you want a "clean" list. The last thing you want is to waste time sending out emails to 1000's of fake email addresses.

One of the problems that got us here was that we had almost no protection in place to prevent spam bots from mass signing up accounts. There was (and still is) a captcha on the signup page, but this kind of captcha is (I'm guessing) 10 years old, and modern spam bots have no problem solving them.

In 2018 we averaged approx. 5600 new user accounts per month. This includes a big spike in June 2018, almost certainly all due to spam. I don't know the exact number of real signups vs. spam ones, but I estimate somewhere between 1000-2000 of those new accounts each month were spam.

At the beginning of 2019, around the time I acquired atWar, we started seeing another really big spike in spam accounts. This reached its peak in March 2019, at which time I implemented new anti-spam measures in our signup process. This greatly reduced the number of spam accounts being created. From May 2019 to now, we've averaged approx. 3400 new user accounts per month (and this has been growing slightly), but the important thing is that these are at least real people making these accounts, not bots. (Yes, I know, probably half of those new accounts are alts, plus a 100 or so a month from unleashed, but this kind of stuff has always gone on.)

The following chart shows this in detail:



Now it was just a question of cleaning up the mess we had accumulated. Without giving the exact formula away, generally speaking I looked for accounts that had never played a game, had obviously fake email addresses, or no email address at all. That amounted to 231,658 user accounts. That was roughly a quarter of our entire user database!

So I'm happy to say these are now gone. Next we can start our email campaigns with much of the list already cleaned out. (And I'm sure as we go we'll find a lot more to clear out, as those less-obvious fake email addresses start bouncing back to us we'll purge some more.)

On to the next task...

Cheers,
Dave