<div dir="ltr">When I was at UMass Amherst I wrote something we referred to internally as a "service handler" that dealt with this. It tied into our account management system. When a user's account disappeared from the system for whatever reason, the first thing it would do is simply make the blog invisible, causing the blog to effectively disappear completely without actually touching any of its content. It set a flag in a database table making a note of when that happened. Some amount of time later (90 days, I think) it would call another piece of custom code someone else wrote that would export the blog's contents, pack it up into a tarball, and shove it into a long-term archive directory just in case someone came back to us screaming for it (which never actually happened while I was there). It then actually deleted the blog for real.<div><br></div><div>When I was first handed responsibility for this system it had been running for years and never been pruned. There were thousands of dormant blogs with 9 database tables each, and three files per table (we used the MyISAM database engine in MySQL). This amounted to hundreds of thousands of files. Even this absurd level of cruft had minimal impact, though. The only practical issues it caused were that rsyncs took an absurdly long time due to the sheer number of files, and the mysqldump utility was absolutely unable to cope with that many tables in a single database. We did our backups by quiescing the database and making a snapshot with LVM, though, which was far more efficient than an SQL-level dump/reload anyway.</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 7:29 PM, Grogan, David <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:David.Grogan@tufts.edu" target="_blank">David.Grogan@tufts.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal">Hello all,<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What process do you have in place to clean up your WP instance of old and inactive sites? Every summer we look at this and go through a process of manual identification (e.g. sites not updated in past 6 months) and go about trying to contact
site admins for permission to delete. It’s time consuming and drudgery. <u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thanks,<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">David<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">--------------------------------------------------------------<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">David Grogan<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Senior Solutions Specialist<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Educational Technology Services (ETS) Tufts Technology Services (TTS) Tufts University<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">108 Bromfield Rd<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Somerville, MA 02144<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Phone: <a href="tel:617.627.2859" value="+16176272859" target="_blank">617.627.2859</a><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Fax: <a href="tel:617.627.3082" value="+16176273082" target="_blank">617.627.3082</a><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://it.tufts.edu/ests" target="_blank"><span style="color:blue">http://it.tufts.edu/ests</span></a><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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