Discuss automatic server list pruning

[amoeba]

I think it's generally good for the servers list to contain only active servers so players don't have to filter through dead servers. After #108, I thought having some mechanism to automatically remove servers that haven't been online in weeks/months would be useful.

What do others think? There was already some discussion on Discord but I wanted to make an issue for visibility.

Note: @jkisor has kindly contributed an Action that we could use to automatically send in a PR to remove a server.

[jovrtn]

Full support for auto-pruning, though for the sake of argument I could see an alternative approach being to simply add a "retired/defunct/decommissioned"-type flag to the server item XML spec and let launchers and other consumers of the data filter those out as desired. Not sure we care about being in the business of maintaining a historical list of servers, though, but interesting data to have nonetheless.

[amoeba]

...I could see an alternative approach being to simply add a "retired/defunct/decommissioned"-type flag...

I think that's a good point and worth considering. Curious what others think. Though I think I'm leaning towards not doing this and just knowing we can always reconstruct a full list from git history.

[Splatterghast]

GDLETest server machine is down, and I don't have login credentials to change dns. Once I get those, those will change. Plus we don't keep GDLETest up 100% of the time, only while testing next release. HT is down for code rebuilding as well but will return every few months for a period of time and then be off again during rebuild testing.

[amoeba]

Thanks @Splatterghast, that's good background.

[jovrtn]

Perhaps #110 could add a longer deletion time for test servers (as defined by the <status> field), since they might be inactive for longer periods.

[Mag-nus]

I support this idea.

I think 3 months might be too short of a prune time. 6 months seems like a better minimum.

I feel that this list should be more of a long term list.

I think it would be more appropriate for tools to start to filter out servers that haven't been seen in X months on their end.