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

[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.