Automatically warn about, then delete, unused projects

I agree with Mark. Just to point out I do not always disagree.

Okay. To make progress here I'd like to see a study into what constitutes an "unused project". Does it only cover projects which were registered and then never touched again (so they'd have a product and a productseries and nothing else) or does it cover projects which were registered, had specs and bugs created, and then nothing else happened to them? The former picks up a large number of cases (maybe 60% of bogus projects) but it's often the case that somebody will create associated objects to test the project with -- and there you have something which isn't auto-deleted. Should we take care of this manually as we are doing today?

And, to be clear, are we saying DELETE projects, or just mark them as inactive?

Setting this to medium due to the manual nature of the cleanup work that is happening today and the fact that it's not the best use of the resources that have authority to do the cleaning. I could be convinced that this is really a high priority but definitely not a low one.

I think that if a project has artifacts (bug reports, translations, etc), it is less likely that a month's inactivity means it is abandoned for good. For artifact-less projects, we may end up with something like: friendly query after two weeks, warning after six weeks, deletion after two months. For projects with artifacts we may end up with something like: friendly query after six months, warning after 17 months, deletion after 18 months. But what the exact periods should be, and how similar they should be, I think we can learn only by slowly ratcheting down as I described in the original report.

As for deletion vs. deactivation, part (though not all) of the point of doing this at all would be to free up the project IDs for more worthy projects. We could rename such projects to projectid-deleted, or we could actually delete them.

I would be in favor of adding a delete command to allow owners of projects to delete them themselves. Earlier this week I created a junk project (which can stay around find), followed by 5 (!!!) other projects, as I kept vascillating about what to call them/it. Now I have 5 "real" projects that are really junk projects. I'm not quite sure how to get rid of them. AFAICT, no one has tried to get a branch from them.

When I search on how to delete projects, all I see lots of posts of someone asking someone else how to delete projects, with a response a bit later from some administrator who has deleted the project.

I realize that sometimes projects might be deleted maliciously (by a disgruntled team member). Maybe you could have something akin to CVS's attic directory where no longer needed projects are kept.

I would also like a way to delete individual files from projects. (Maybe that already exists??)

Please delete my project "Coditor". I accidently made it.