LiveJournal's awful plan

[cos]

In the latest omnibus post on news, LiveJournal writes:

Purging inactive accounts: ... A journal is defined as inactive if it has not been logged into for 24 consecutive months. A community is defined as inactive if has not been updated for 24 consecutive months. Once an account is eligible to be purged for inactivity, the owner will be sent an email to alert them of the inactive status. The owner will then have two weeks to log into the journal or post to their community to prevent it from being deleted. If the owner does not log in or post, the account will be deleted and treated like any other deleted account ...

If you've got any friends who have left their LiveJournals, and possibly changed email addresses since then, or just aren't likely to pay prompt attention to an email from LiveJournal, and they've commented on your posts, or you've commented on their posts, LiveJournal wants to delete all of that. Why? So that if someone else maybe wants the username, it can be available. Who cares about existing content - people's past writing - when someone new might possibly someday want that username.

If you think this is as bad an idea as I do, please leave feedback for LJ, and please repost or link to this.

Edit: I think they got a lot of feedback, because they've edited the post to change the definition of an inactive account or community: It's not inactive if it has more than one post.

Edit2: A private response to feedback I left yesterday tells me about the changes and the edited news post, and adds that comments of inactive accounts won't be deleted. I asked them to re-edit the news post to add that.

Comments

[cinnabarine.livejournal.com]

Perhaps this is a dumb question, but are you sure those comments would get deleted? I deleted my old account and I can still see comments made with it. For example, this one.

[cos]

Yes, the news post makes it clear that all comments would be deleted. And of course all posts by the account being deleted, and all comments by anyone that are on any of those posts.

[cinnabarine.livejournal.com]

This definitely sucks for inactive accounts, then. But I'm hoping it means they'll finally get around to deleting all my old junk!

[cos]

They should have some method for people to be able to request deletion of their own old content.

[ron_newman]

But I see plenty of old comments from deleted (struck-through) accounts in Davis Square LJ now. The comments weren't deleted just because the account was.

[cos]

Why does that have any bearing on this?

[ron_newman]

Because it shows that when accounts are deleted, the comments in communities stay around. (However, comments from suspended accounts seem to go away.)

[cos]

You're still ignoring the issue. The news post that described this made it clear that all comments from the inactive accounts would be deleted. And I said so in the very comment you replied to. So why is it relevant that something else was done differently? It's something else.

[ron_newman]

I don't see where it says that comments made by deleted accounts will be deleted.

[sparr0.livejournal.com]

It requires some internet savvy (by which I mean clicking the relevant links) to find thus:

The new modifications will actually allow us to purge not only deleted and suspended accounts, but inactive accounts as well, as announced in today's [info]news post. This was not the only change put into the worker scripts; we also had to add logic that removed comments and community entries posted by accounts being purged. This was an important change, since many of the suspended accounts have inappropriate content in their comments and community entries.

emphasis mine

[ron_newman]

Hmm, I took that to mean only that this would happen to suspended accounts being purged. Guess we'd better ask for clarification.

[cos]

They also say they've developed this new script for both purges. And in the section on inactive purges, they give a link to "the technical details" and that post again describes the same script, for both kinds of purges. It's pretty clear. Maybe it's mistaken and they actually meant to write something different, but what they wrote is not ambiguous.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I take it they edited the post, because it now states that a requirement for inactivity be that the journal/community have one post or fewer.

[leora.livejournal.com]

The story that seems to be coming through Support channels is that there were multiple specifications written up and the news post accidentally used an older version and not the version they agreed on.

Whether this is true or spin, I have no way of knowing. But the version as originally written is pretty stupid and does go against what LJ has always said about how it would do account purges, whereas the edited version is much more in-line with long-standing statements, that it seems plausible. However, that argument loses some value when LJ has been bought twice and it's not like we know if SUP will keep to various long-standing statements. But I strongly suspect many of the employees would have wanted the newer edited version, and I can see how the write-up could have been done not realizing that it forgot to put in that info or by someone who didn't know enough to do a sanity-check proofread to realize they were writing up from the wrong version.

[penk.livejournal.com]

The 'long standing policy' that LJ will never delete accounts was absurd on the face of it. One-offs created just to snark a thread somewhere should be archived forever? That makes no sense.

Understand that I support keeping comments and posts. I do not, however, support keeping the usernames. They should be released.

Older posts may be flagged or renamed to something like oldUserName(Deleted) perhaps, but the usernames should be released.

[cos]

Although the newer version is much improved, it still means that accounts that made lots of comments but didn't post will get deleted and all their comments will be deleted. That's still bad.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Well, the accounts would be deleted, that's true, and possibly not something they should do. But why would the comments be deleted? That isn't part of a standard journal purge. The comments of a purged journal generally get reassigned to ex_$username-here## or perhaps it is ex$username-here_## something like that, it's been a while. Did they say anything about deleting the comments in other people's journals and communities?

The comments within a journal get deleted if that journal gets deleted. The comments within a community get deleted if that community gets deleted. The comments of suspended accounts no longer display, and those would be lost, but often that's part of the point; it depends on the reason for suspension.

It's been a while since I've done this sort of thing, so it could have changed, but that's the way I recall it working.

And I'm not sure how I feel about keeping the username attached to comments in an account that has only been used to comment and hasn't been used in over 2 years. It's possible that they should, and that would be worth bringing up in the news post, although opening name space is also useful. Possibly there should be a minimum number of comments made needed as well.

[cos]

They did, in fact, say they would delete comments. The news post talks about a new purge process that deletes all content associated with a purged account, and that purge process would be used first on suspended accounts and then on inactive accounts. They also included a link to a post with more technical detail, and that post also describes the same new purge process, which it explicitly says is for both suspended and inactive accounts.

However, I just got a private response to my feedback from last night, that indicates they've changed their mind and that perhaps accounts with comments won't be purged. Or their comments won't be.

BTW, I do know several people who got LJ accounts *only* so that they could participate in their friends' LJs, including friendslocked content, but never intended to post their own posts. I was actually initially one of those people, sort of. Some of them eventually started posting, but others did not. I value those comment threads no less than comment threads where every participating commenter also posts in their own LJ.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see that bit now under suspended accounts. It's way too early in the morning for me (really, I shouldn't be up, but I woke up and can't sleep)... I did look, but just missed it. Yes, I don't like removing the comments of deleted accounts. I'm fine with that for suspended accounts, but not deleted ones.

If they were just recycling the usernames, I'd be much more okay with this. I agree that having not posted does not necessarily mean that the account hasn't contributed valuable content. And I also dislike things that break comment threads. I know another site that does delete comments of deleted accounts, and it makes for very bizarre comment threads when you read them. The loss of content is quite harmful. I'm not clear on what they think they gain by deleting the comments for purged accounts, except if they can't tell the difference between suspended and deleted, in which case they should fix that.

[penk.livejournal.com]

I fully support this plan. I don't think that deleting old content should be done (I find some of the old archives interesting - it woudl be like deleting old usenet posts).

But, the alternative is a username can never, EVER be reused, even if it's abandoned.

I have a username that is directly relevant to me that I've been wanting to use for 6 years. The original user created it, posted a few times, then abandoned it.

This should be archived for all eternity? No.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Sounds like if they posted a few times it wouldn't qualify. But I have other friends who have a standard username they want, which exists already --with no friends, no comments, and no posts.

[cos]

There do seem to be some people with your view, that reclaiming usernames in case someone happens to want them is more important than leaving past posts and discussions in place. I'm glad you're apparently in the minority, though. I don't see what's so important about making already-used usernames available (and only some of them are names people particularly want to re-use) that makes it more important than leaving posts and discussions as they are.

[rkt.livejournal.com]

based on prior experiences with the different incarnations of lj, i do not trust them to not accidentally (or noaccidentally) purge (however that ends up meaning) people's journals who were not even 'qualified' for deletion/purging.