[DeviantArt] Does DA have a "garbage collection" mechanism for deactivated accounts?

[ClosedPort22]

I recently used gallery-dl to scrape some deactivated accounts. Their home pages had been replaced with the "deactivated account" page, but the deviations were still accessible to gallery-dl (see #3018). I tried to access two of these accounts today and it seemed that they were completely gone. One of them was still accessible as recently as 6 days ago. This led me to think that maybe DA has some sort of "garbage collection" mechanism for deleted accounts, or even worse, the action of accessing them with gallery-dl somehow triggered the "deletion". But the account mentioned in #3018 still seems to be fine. Maybe it's because it was deactivated relatively recently?

Edit: A quick google search shows that deactivated accounts can be reactivated within 30 days, but #3018 was created on Oct 7, and the account remains accessible.

[rautamiekka]

The way I see how it works:

1. Deactivated accounts will be deleted after 30d of no reactivation if requested by the User, just like you observed.
2. Banned accounts won't be deleted by the staff under most circumstances. Not a 100%-certain observation, though.
3. Account contents are accessible through the API and direct links (much like public-made-unlisted YouTube uploads) unless deletion was requested (number 1) or forced (number 2). This is why you still have a chance if you find a link to an upload whose uploader was deactivated/banned.

So, no, there's no such GC mechanism on DA, even if the account was deactivated/banned on the 1st day.

[ClosedPort22]

Banned accounts won't be deleted by the staff under most circumstances.

I did notice that the API reported that both accounts had been banned ("status": "banned"), but I thought it was possible that DA also used the value for deactivated accounts, since their account pages simply said "deactivated account" and gave no indication of having been banned.

If they indeed had been banned, then I think the explanation for my observation is either:

• both accounts (unrelated to each other) were flagged for deletion by the owners or the staff at around the same time, and I was really lucky to have scraped them before the final deletion, or
• there exists a GC mechanism for banned accounts.

Do you know of any accounts that are still accessible despite having been banned long ago? The existence of such accounts should disprove the second hypothesis.