Recovering Access to Your Account

[Brother Tyler]

To recover access to your account, please contact the administrators. They'll need proof of identity - the e-mail address associated with the account.

[Brother Tyler]

Note that we have deleted many member accounts over the years in an effort to keep the database lean. Our criteria for these account deletions:

• Member has zero content* (e.g., no topics, no replies, etc.).
• Member has not been active (i.e., they haven't logged in) in over 10 years.
• Member is in the + FRATER NOVUS + or + FRATER DOMUS + group.

All three criteria had to be met for the account to be pruned. If any of these were not met, the account was retained.

 

Some members had zero content because they never actually participated, only creating an account and then lurking. Some of these members never participated at all, dropping out of the hobby/community in time; and others created other accounts later which became active.

 

Other members had zero content because of the time the system crashed and our database was wiped out. That was in 2005 and we lost a lot of really great content.

 

Still other members had zero content because of an old practice which has since been abandoned. When the site was first created, we (the staff) would periodically delete old discussion topics. That tapered off, though we occasionally deleted rumors and event topics once the products were released (or disproven) or the events had passed. When we were preparing for the software update in 2022, we deleted a lot of discussion topics in an effort to keep the database lean. However, we discovered that the removal of this content had a negative impact on members' achievements - the system could not count content that no longer existed. So we dropped that practice in 2022, instead creating a location for obsolete content which would remove it from public visibility while ensuring that the system would preserve the contributing members' achievements.

 

So some of these members may have been active one time, but all records of that activity (i.e., the content they submitted) has been lost.

 

Members in other groups that met the other criteria were not deleted for record-keeping purposes. Anyone who served as a staff member has both activity (even if you can't see it) and a unique title. Likewise, it is important to preserve the members who have been permanently banned for misbehavior so that we have a record and can refer to that content if they ever return to the site and we are able to associate the new account(s) with the previous misbehaving accounts, which has happened and will likely happen in the future.

 

* Note that the "zero content" description may be inaccurate. While these members had zero topics, discussion comments/replies, blogs/blog entries, articles, and files, some may have had images/albums in the Gallery. Some definitely had avatars/personal photos and some may have had signatures/About Me pages. Since these members don't have any other content (topics, comments, etc.), however, any images they may have had in the Gallery were either used at external sites or simply resided in our Gallery (i.e., in our database) with no other use. If so, these images were populating our database and putting a pointless load on our server. In the limited sampling we took of the members who met the criteria identified in the bullets above, however, none of the members had such images.

 

So if you are a returning member, it's possible that your old account no longer exists. Before you create a new account, however, please contact the Administrators so we can check to see if the account exists. If your account exists, that means that any content you created probably still exists, too, and the results of that participation (achievements/badges, reputation, rank) still exist and we want everyone to be recognized for their participation in the site/hobby. We can always update email accounts and assign temporary passwords so that you can recover access to your account and content, and we're happy to do that for you.