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Yes, it is sad and a difficult decision. However, I feel that if a visitor comes to this website and sees Afanen, Glaw, Grwn, etc. on the list of Welsh names then I have left them misinformed. To me it is an improvement to have these names removed.

It's uncommon when a name is deleted from the database. However, as I was looking through the Irish and Welsh categories it became pretty clear there were some problem names. Most of them dated back to the very early days of the site and had never been revised. Some referred to historical or mythological figures and could be moved into a more appropriate category (Old Irish/Welsh, Irish/Welsh Mythology). Otherwise if I could just find a few bearers I was content marking the name as "rare". I was left with a handful of irredeemable names with an insignificant number of bearers (most often 0) in the target categories.

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To answer your question, yes I do maintain a set of rough numbers that I can refer to when assigning names to categories. These are the minimum number of bearers expected when doing searches on various social media platforms, forebears, etc. It is obviously much easier when there are comprehensive statistics available, like for the US and France!

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For the submitted names database we have a rule that there needs be just one verifiable bearer of a name in order for it to be included. Some of the deleted names could maybe be re-added there on that basis, but perhaps under a different category.