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

[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.