[wp-edu] Process for pruning/retiring inactive sites?

[Michael Barnard]

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.

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.

On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 7:29 PM, Grogan, David <David.Grogan at tufts.edu>
wrote:

>  Hello all,
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> David
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
>
> David Grogan
>
> Senior Solutions Specialist
>
> Educational Technology Services (ETS) Tufts Technology Services (TTS)
> Tufts University
>
> 108 Bromfield Rd
>
> Somerville, MA  02144
>
>
>
> Phone: 617.627.2859
>
> Fax: 617.627.3082
>
> http://it.tufts.edu/ests
>
>
>
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