Is there any way to get my KGS account reactivated? It appears to have been deactivated or expired due to inactivity.

I last logged in last year (2013) and, now, when I try to sign in, it says: "The user name you gave does not exist."

I can still see my old games when I go to the archives and tick the "include expired ... accounts" box and I still have the email address I used and my password.

I am really sad that it has been deactivated because it dates back to when I first started playing Go and is my oldest online account. (Also, I was unaware that KGS killed accounts due to inactivity. NOBODY does that!)

You can re-register. My account has expired 6-7 times already and I always just register it again. No problem.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Do you lose your game history when you re-register?

You can log in with the same name as a guest and register the account.

Sigh... it seems that, yes, your WHOLE ACCOUNT HISTORY is lost when you re-register.

Eight years, friends, hundreds of games... gone.

I really, really hate KGS, today.

I wouldn't complain too much. It happens to everyone. Those games have not gone - they are still in the archive. They were going to expire from your account after 6 months anyway.

I had one of the oldest accounts on KGS - created the year it was started. That account had a list of the 50 oldest accounts on KGS in its info and it was near the top of the list. But, because of other things I did not log into it for a long time. I could swear it was less than 6 months because I was very careful to log into each of my accounts every few months. But I guess I forgot that one on one occasion.

But, I still have three accounts well over twelve years old, so I guess I should not complain.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

To see your old games, go to the kgs game archives and use the include expired and guest accounts option.

I'm sorry but yes, accounts do expire after about six months of inactivity (it's actually 180 days plus a few days before the housekeeping routine sweeps out the database). Or two years if the account has ever had KGS+.

This is to keep the size of the database within manageable limits. Otherwise it would expand to a ridiculous size to hold all those unused accounts. Six months seems a reasonable period of time, surely? And yes, many online systems do something similar.

But if the name hasn't been taken by someone else, you can reregister it and your previous games will still be linked to it.

I do feel your pain, though, because my oldest account got accidentally forgotten about. It wasn't quite as old as DrStraw's, but was pretty old. *sob* And it was a cute name too, that someone else has now registered.

With a little effort in the archives you should be able to find the names of your old friends on KGS, it's what I do whenever I need to remember a name after a deactivation (which has happened to me more times than I wish to recall)

Even if the account hadn't disappeared after eight years, the last seven and a half years of games were already gone from the account's game list anyway, so what you lost now is the info and the picture, and perhaps the name itself, if someone took it.

(Of course, one can argue that games should not disappear from the game list.)

This is the first I've heard of user accounts that don't require a paid subscription expiring. So at least in the bits of the web I frequent KGS is an exception, not part of many sites with similar management styles.

I'm very curious how many accounts KGS is dealing with? And the hardware behind it? I'm having trouble imagining this truly being taxing on any server more modern than a potato.

Not sure what you usually use. Gmail accounts expire in around 9 months of inactivity. Hotmail accounts used to expire after 6 months. Twitter after 6 months.

Having a huge table for user ids that is 99% useless will be eventually taxing for any hardware, no matter how powerful.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Using Google, Microsoft, and Twitter as examples is equivalent to using NASA to defend the quality of American cars. The difference in scale and requirements is so vast as to render the analogy wholly useless.

How about just a preference? I like that the accounts timeout. That way common names that people want can be used more often if people just quit go and the server. There are names I've wanted on other places that no one has used for 10 years.

of



...seems pretty reasonable to me.

I agree with Oren, it's nice to have unused names get recycled so we don't have to end up with pinwheel67 just to login.

After six months of inactivity the account has no rank, no games are associated with it on the server, and they haven't been directly interacting with the community in any way (chatting, spectating, etc). In most cases there is little to no value in retaining that name. The "damage" can be undone simply by registering the name again.

Well, what Mef said. I won't delve into smallish sites to check what policies they have. Also, they have economies of scale that make non-deleting accounts a possibility. As a site owner, if purging the database of unused id's improves 10ms of server response time, I'll do. At the very least, my server will reply faster. In most scenarios (Amazon, Rackspace) I'll pay less because the query will consume less resources. And that's why some sites purge id's, not accounting for name recycling (as oren points out).

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

One think that would be nice is to archive the deleted information so that if a user registers it with the same e-mail within 6 months then nothing would be lost, but if it is registered with a new e-mail then it would start anew. I say this because I used to have an account which had a lot of information in the user info about the 50 oldest accounts on KGS. I gleened this when I was an admin and had access to the KGS database. Once I resigned as an admin I lost access and so could not recreate the info when the account expired.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Cool idea.
But can't that be solved by simply saving the info locally? Its just text, no?

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Sure. But accidents happen. The account I was referring to I logged into every 3 months to make sure it didn't die. It still did, and I am convinced it was not 6 months. But I guess it must have been because no one else every complained about early deletion.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).