Huge registered player drop

[Bael]

I was just checking the stats on Dwilight, and between the middle and end of last month the registered player base declined by one third. Surely this must be a bug? Or was it a sudden, massive cleanup? Or somehow related to the new code? Any other theories?

Edit: mind you, I believe that is a global statistic. Hmm...

[Zakilevo]

Probably some old data got cleaned up.

[Indirik]

At irregular intervals, inactive and abandoned accounts are deleted. That is probably what this was.

[Anaris]

Specifically, I believe there was, for some time, a bug in the cleanup script that led to old inactive accounts not being removed.

This bug was fixed, leading to the large number of auto-deletions a few weeks ago, and that drop in the registered count.