PeterX wrote:
Well, I said: Those who did post nothing, not once! I think these "sleeping" accounts are used for spam.
Or are used for lurking. Though we can just look at the last login time, so that is easy to tell apart. In the alternative, most of these accounts are going to be what we in Germany call "Karteileichen", i.e. people that are still on file but not actually part of the group anymore. Maybe they lost interest, or they lost the password and failed to recover it, or they opened alternative accounts, or maybe they died (or had a plane crash in Nigeria and lost their memory or something). That is the by far most likely explanation, so I'm going with it. Major amounts of sleeper spam accounts are rather unlikely.
Though that means being deleted isn't a detriment to them. Maybe make it so that accounts that have been inactive for a while must do what new users must do now? That would allow lurkers to continue lurking and wouldn't outright remove anyone from the site, and would prevent spam sleepers from doing their work.