“Back in the day” (circa 2009) there was occasional participation from the company founders and early library contributors but not the sort of interaction you are referring to. I find it curious that that is the case. I’m sure that Arduino as a company sees the value of helper participation in this forum and would find it problematic if that were suddenly to end.
Discourse supports suspending accounts (can't login).
If this change makes dedicated, long term members consider leaving this community, it can’t be a good change.
Good that it has been canceled.
To be clear, it has not been canceled.
At the current time, it has only been put on hold temporarily to give the Arduino company time to evaluate alternatives to the currently stated plan to anonymize the forum accounts of users whose arduino.cc accounts are deleted due to not having logged in during the previous 24 months.
Per the highest-karma helpful folks on:
https://forum.arduino.cc/badges/112/karma-3000
...it looks like 3/7 of them would end up anonymous if this hold ended August 1st.
Arduino certainly has the right to be evil, but is there anyone on this thread (or off of it) who thinks it is a good idea?
What I mean is that it looks like 95%+ of users who cared enough to comment on the topic don't think it's a particularly good idea.
- one can apply for the GDPR right to get forgotten: - arduino.cc needs a function to anonymize these posts or must find another measure to follow GDPR.
- one doesn't show up in two years and arduino.cc decides to get rid of these accounts. The community is in big favour to still be able to identify the origin of the post.
These are two different use cases. Don't see more here.
Assuming that the anonymization goes ahead, what are the rules for the re-use of a user name. Can for example a new @aarg (currently known simply as @anon57585045) suddenly appear ?
I don't think anyone cares whether store/cloud/edu accounts are terminated or anonymized; they're not "content provided by authors." (I'm not sure anonymization is even relevant there.)
The security being discussed in your post I quoted is the security of the arduino.cc account, which is used for authentication on all the components of the arduino.cc website.
The subject of security, which you raised, is separate from the subject of anonymization.
Regardless of the debate about if it is necessary or not to "anonymize" the inactive users and apart from any email notification, the top forum banner still remains a mystery to me because I see we could have just three situations:
- an user is inactive (but not disabled/anonymized yet): they won't access the forum, so no one ever can read it (making the banner useless)
- if instead he/she logs back in before the end date, they aren't "inactive" anymore (and again, making that banner useless)
- if after the 24 months (let's call it a "grace period") they will be disabled and/or anonymized, they still can't read anything (again and again, making the banner even more useless)
So, even I read the dead end has been posponed, I think that annoying banner can be trashed away. 
The banner may bring the situation to the attention of an active user who is a friend of an inactive user. The active user may then warn the inactive user of the situation. In case the inactive user didn't notice the notification email, this will save them from the loss of their account.
Those who no longer post on the forum, but still work on embedded systems projects are likely to still visit the forum periodically without logging in. Forum pages are often a valuable search result when doing any sort of research related to embedded systems.
The banner brings the situation to the attention of the active users. The active users can then provide their feedback about the Arduino company's plans here in this forum thread. That feedback may give the decision makers at the Arduino company a metric of how the community feels about the plan, which may influence how they decide to proceed.
The current banner content is only here temporarily during this important period.
The banner itself has been in place ever since 2021. It normally advertises the Arduino Cloud service. It will go back to being used for that purpose once the current temporary content is reverted. So it is not as if it is taking up space that you would normally have while using the forum.
Temporarily postponed doesn't mean the situation is resolved.
It is still essential for inactive users who don't want their accounts to be deleted to log in.
It is still important for interested community members to share their feedback about the plan.
It is strange to me that the community complains so much about how the Arduino company doesn't communicate with the forum community. But then when efforts are made to more effectively communicate, then the community finds reasons to complain about that.
When the community acts in a negative manner whenever the Arduino company does make an effort to communicate, is it any wonder that those who might make such communications don't feel motivated to do so?
Well, I don't know if you were annoyed by what I wrote, but mine absolutely wasn't a complain!
It was first of all just a (friendly) point of view from a user who has been on the forum for several years, and I also used that ending emoticon on purpose (or trying to better show my intentions).
It's just a personal suggestion on a topic that IMO is just not very useful (I never wanted to make it a criticism of the Arduino team, obviously...). 
If, as I hope happens, an inactivity warning is already being sent via email to each "almost inactive" user (aka some time before its 48 months of inactivity), I think it's enough.
And in this case it still makes that banner senseless to me, sorry.
No offense, Pert, please don't take it personally about that! Don't take it the wrong way, I'm sorry if you did it because I really appreciate your commitment (and that of the whole team) on Arduino forums. So I promise I won't get on that again.
Some of see our mortality more clearly (and approaching more rapidly) than others, and we want what we've created on the net to be part of our legacy. (Other people have the medalert bracelets that say "delete my browser history"... 
)
Community members being upset about the possible loss of that legacy is completely understandable and understood.
However, that is not the "complaining" I was referring to in the sentence you quoted.
I think it is available as a feature of the latest models of ejector toilet seats.
Yes, an email is sent. You can see the text of it (with the links removed since, at the time it was posted, they were causing concern among the participants and didn't seem to be relevant to the discussion at that point) in post #1 of this thread.
I do think the email will be most effective in communicating with the inactive users. However, it is possible that some of them do not closely monitor the email address associated with their account, or that the email might have been stuck in the spam filter.
One of the participants in the thread suggested that the Arduino company should make a stronger effort at communicating to the community about the policy and enforcement plan. So I decided to take the measures that are in my power in order to do so (knowing full well the deficiency of those measures).
FWIW, purely as an example, if I were inactive, I would not have received such an email until recently; we abandoned our old ISP, and we went 8 months or more before I updated my email addy with Arduino. I'm sure this is a relatively common event.
As for that banner not being read, visiting the forum without logging in is something I do quite often, and the banner is prominent.
Per, you are taking the response of 1 or a small number of people and equating that with everyone here. One person complaining is one person complaining, not 'the community' (whatever 'community' means in this context) complaining.
Do a poll, then 
Dear Arduino Team,
Thank you for reaching out to me. I would like to inform you that I am still actively developing with Arduino and would like to maintain my account on Arduino.cc. I apologize for the inactivity over the past 24 months.
I appreciate the information about the recent updates, especially regarding Arduino Cloud. I am very interested in exploring the new features and will take advantage of the 30-day trial on the Maker monthly plan with the provided code.
To ensure the continuity of my account and avoid any loss of data or projects, I will log in before June 15th, 2024, as instructed.
Thank you for your understanding and support.
Best regards,
Ricardo Lima Caratti.
So the discussion doesn't go the way you desire and you know better than your users, means you will ignore what is communicated in this thread ?
Doesn't forecast a very long lifetime left for this community.
Dictatorship means the beginning of the end.
And save @nickgammon