response 25 of 44:

Aug 3 18:54 UTC 1995

It may be difficult to verify users, but we usually manage to find a way.
When we can't, it is because the account was essentially anonymous
to begin with. I'd rather not shorten up the reaping time to make it
easier to deal with this problem. It's a very minor problem on Grex.

I would guess that about 10% of the lost passwords (not counting those
already reaped) are told there is no way to verify them, and they must
create a new account.

I would agree jep, if we routinely responded to lost passwords by telling
people to recreate the account.

response 27 of 44:

Aug 28 03:01 UTC 1995

in reference tosometing a ways back-- start the "hold my acount over the
summer please" announcementns in March, sted April...motd, and items
in several conferences entered by the respective fws.
  
it might be a bitof a mess this particular year due to the confluence
of several (probably) non-recurring situations. And i sympathize seriously
with popcorn and others dealing with thje situation. I'm a large
mail-spool user myself for more reasons than just that disk-bug %^&*%$^$%*$%.

but this is the account reap item.... my suggestion, in general would
be for 120 day reaps at 30 Sept, 30 Jan, 30 May, 30 Sept,.... which would
overlap the semester problem, i think, rather nicely.

+also+, one of my suggestions (thatwas implemented)was to add the question
in NewUser about "alternate email addresses." If that line is filled in,
the ReapMaster (tm) +could+ send email 10/20/30/? days in advance of
a reap to see wazzz-zup?  That process couldalmost beautomated, btw.

imo, this sort of structure would present itself, and Grex, as rational
and compassionate and tidy.

response 29 of 44:

Aug 28 05:02 UTC 1995

  We could try and use the alternate email address, but I think
they're valid something less than 50% of the time.
  The problem with reaping 4 times a year means that the passwd
file would be HUGE, and until everything that needs that file
is taught about the shadow system, some things would really
suffer.
  We "protected" the ID's of all those who asked, which wasn't
that much.  My preference would still be to let it be known that
this can be done, but make the people do it, if they really
care about Grex.  Remember, most accounts are used only a little,
then people go off elsewhere in cyberspace.

response 31 of 44:

Aug 28 13:33 UTC 1995

Um, "continual" not "continuous"?

response 33 of 44:

Aug 29 05:42 UTC 1995

There's no point in lengthening the reap period now, but if we could
extend it to 120 days before next summer, I'd be a lot happier.

(English teachers disagree, but my dictionary lists countinous and
continual as synonyms. "Uninterrupted in time" - At the finest shade of
meaning, you're probably right, Dave)

response 35 of 44:

Aug 30 12:50 UTC 1995

I like the 120 day reap idea, but I think it *almost* solves the problem
but not entirely.  When I was a student at U of M, the last day of
exams was around April 30, and school started again in the first week
of September.  That's about 135 days.  Plus maybe an extra day or two
for someone who didn't log on during exams, or who can't get to a computer
first thing when they get back to campus.  Would it work to increase the
reap threshold to 120 days *and* stop reaping from maybe August 20 to
September 10?

response 37 of 44:

Sep 3 06:46 UTC 1995

   I was curious as to how many attempts there have been to log
into old accounts that were deleted, possibly becasue of summer
inactivity.

   So, what I did was look in one of the logs that Grex keeps
of invalid logins, went back to August 25th, and gathered up
every failed login and sorted them.  I then took the list of
every account that has been reaped here since July 20th, figuring
that some people might not have been able to log in since
April 20th.  I wound up with 2,862 accounts that we've zapped,
and compared them to the list of failed logins.

   74 deleted accounts have had an attempt to be logged into,
out of those 2,862.

   This means that so far, about 2.5% of the accounts that
might have been inactive because of no access to the net over
the summer were deleted, and when the owner got back to
school they found this out.

   And of course, inactivity for any other reason is in
these figures, so it might be that there are even fewer
students who didn't have access to the net this summer.

   We need to do this again in a week or two, but I am
beginning to think that this is at least somewhat a non-problem,
and the best solution might be to tell users about where
to send mail to in order to preserve an account over the
summer.

response 39 of 44:

Sep 7 17:09 UTC 1995

   I'm not sure.  I need to run this again and we'll see how many
more people tried in this last week.  I do know that the gripe/trouble
mailing list has gotten two or three comments about an account not
working becuase of the reap.  I did expect more.  Perhaps there are
more, but the mail went to a known staff person?

   As far as figuring out how many failed account entries then
initiated a newuser, that would take some doing, and I don't think
it can be really accurately determined.  If someone finds out that
their account was terminated at zxy.edu, and then gets around to
recreating it while on abc.com (with a different name) we'd never
see the connection.  I can determine how many of those deleted
people got back on with their same names though.  I'll do that.

response 41 of 44:

Sep 12 02:06 UTC 1995

So, out of curiosity, was reaping suspended?

response 43 of 44:

Sep 12 21:00 UTC 1995

   If I can find a time that the system is horridly busy, I'll
check for failed logins again aginst the list of reaped accounts.
I'll report back one of these weeks...