there go all my tags

[eruthros]

So apparently LJ is like, hey guys, you know what would be awesome? If we deleted journals that haven't been logged into in more than two years, even if they have content! And ditto communities that haven't been posted in for two years! Wouldn't that be awesome?

One of the benefits of the work we've done to purge suspended accounts is that we will now be able to purge inactive journals and communities too--something you've been requesting for years! 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. [...] Again, you can read technical details about suspended and inactive account purges in this post. We'll be sure to let you know when these purged usernames become available.

From the news post. And when I followed the link to the technical details, I discovered that:

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 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.

From the lj maintenance post about purging accounts.

Like, that might be poor phrasing in the lj maintenance post, referring only to posts/comments by suspended users and not by purged-inactive users, I guess. But the way I read it, it seems to be saying that inactive journals include journals that have content, and that the comments left by those ljers on my posts, and the posts by those ljers to communities, are going to vanish. (Please tell me I'm reading that wrong.)

I am just ... like, I think 90% of everything I've tagged on delicious in the last five years is on lj. And, just, poof! And poof go people's comments in my journal, and poof go giant RPing comms like Nocturne Alley, and poof go community posts, and poof goes everything by everyone who was using lj as an archive four years ago before they moved to facebook. I kind of can't even wrap my brain around it. I just went to my old lj profile, and counted offhand seven comms that would be deleted under this policy, and those are just the ones I'm still subscribed to, not things I've tagged.

ETA: Someone has just edited the news post to say "A journal is defined as inactive if it has not been logged into for 24 consecutive months and has only one post (i.e., the welcome post). A community is defined as inactive if has not been updated for 24 consecutive months and has only one entry and no comments." So it would still be grabbing the journals of RPers and people who have journals only to post to communities, and their posts to communities/comments would vanish, I think, but at least it would leave journals that have some entries. Probably.

Comments

[some_stars]

It bothers me SO MUCH (uh, evidently *g*) because it's this combination of pandering to ONTD-style users, and completely missing THE ENTIRE POINT of using Livejournal. Once someone starts posting, the WHOLE COMMUNITY has a stake in their writing. Short of them deciding to delete it themselves, no one person should be able to erase it. That's WHY we're on LJ, because we LIKE that we get all tangled up in each other's activities and histories. I am just so glad I've stopped giving LJ money because they are clearly using it to do EVERYTHING I HATE.

[eruthros]

It bothers me SO MUCH (uh, evidently *g*) because it's this combination of pandering to ONTD-style users, and completely missing THE ENTIRE POINT of using Livejournal. Once someone starts posting, the WHOLE COMMUNITY has a stake in their writing.

Yes, this! When I'm on lj's site, I'm not there to blog to a group of people -- I mean, now I don't crosspost, but even two years ago I definitely didn't spend most of my time making posts to my own journal. I'm there to comment on other people's posts, and to read their fic, and to post to communities.

I just now discovered Avatar: The Last Airbender, and I'm perusing for fanfic, and since the show starting airing five years ago I've spent the last week or so reading (mostly) fic that's more than two years old. And it's kind of shattering to realize, having just done all that fannish archive-digging, that some huge percentage of what I just read and tagged on delicious and commented on yesterday might be gone in another few weeks.

[giandujakiss]

If they go through with this it'll at least push me over the edge to turning off LJ comments and corralling them all to Dreamwidth.

[stewardess]

There are genuinely inactive journals, whose owners will not even notice they are gone, and then there are archives. Chance of LJ understanding the difference: zero.

Guess I shouldn't dally too long in getting my fanfic over to AO3.

[eruthros]

Yeah, exactly. And people have suggested ways to sort out the difference, but lj doesn't seem to be getting it -- that even journals with no posts can be an important part of archives if they commented regularly!

[starlady]

I just checked my LJ profile, and I have some people I haven't spoken with in five years and others I chat with every other night friended on LJ--both have inactive accounts, but the first group haven't looked at the site in as long, and the second group are a real presence in my LJ experience.

If it were only deleted and suspended, fine. Petty, but fine. But the inactive accounts too is going way too far--we as users in the LJ community have a right to other people's comments and entries because they are part of that public space, even if the account holders themselves don't post to their damn journals anymore.

[fish_echo]

My understanding is that in order for LJ to be able to offer up usernames which are 'not used' (according to whatever whacked metric they want to say), they have to delete all prior content associated with that username's first existence. And they want to do this for the rename token payments or whatthefuckever. *sigh* LJ is really fucking annoying these days. But there are people I would really miss if I left LJ entirely and I can't currently stand to give them up. But I'm not sure how much more of LJ's asshattery I can take before I just say fuckit, add some openID accounts to my access filters and cross my fingers that I don't loose touch with these people. If I didn't have so much past experience regretting friendships fallen by the wayside via the passage of time I'd totally have been off of LJ already. *grrrrrr*

I suppose this means I should go through all my rec posts to check for any posts made by deleted journals to comms, so I can print those to file before they're gone forever. And, if I'm on top of things, perhaps host them somewhere eventually (because I'm assuming that the authors leaving those posts up even thought the journal itself was deleted is granting implicit permission for the continued reading of those stories). Grah, LJ, I had enough to do already!

[eruthros]

It's totally for the rename payments, and because there are always people asking for inactive accounts to be deleted so they can have the names. But LJ doesn't understand what "inactive" means in terms of information in their community: people who just comment are still important! People who just post to comms are still important! etc.

[fish_echo]

I've always wondered at the people who're all *gimmegimmegrabbyhands* about account names... I mean, you get an account early on and you get the best choice of names, you get one later and well, you deal. Possibly by having a fairly unique name, possibly by modifying your wished-for name. But most importantly, you deal. I guess this is one of those things that is just part of my mindset coming from forums and boards which would only ever flush a username if a reaaaaally long time had gone by and the user had never posted any content. Well, and those fora and boards were the sort which were usually controlled/administered by users so there was less of this disconnect between the admins and the userbase.

And it seems so simple a thing to track the number of comments made-- it's already displayed at the top of everyone's profile! It really shouldn't be too hard to include that in the code's logic! *grraaaah*

Yeah, buddy, I'm with you on the exasperation. But at least DW exists! *is desperately attempting to look on the bright side*

[fairestcat]

"A journal is defined as inactive if it has not been logged into for 24 consecutive months and has only one post (i.e., the welcome post). A community is defined as inactive if has not been updated for 24 consecutive months and has only one entry and no comments."

This is better, sure, but it still has a lot of potential to damage fandom.

RP accounts for older/inactive RPs may have been inactive for over 24 months and may have no entries if the RP entirely involved community posting.

Especially in the early days of the great livejournal migration, but still now in some fandoms, many authors post fic directly to communities and not to their journals at all. Some who post only to communities or mirror their posts to communities have since deleted their journals, or removed all their posts for various reasons. I know when I'm updating my recs sets, I often run into old and abandoned journals where there is no content left anymore at all.

The biggest thing for me here is that livejournal isn't paying any attention to comments and community entries in their judgment of which journals to purge. Comments and community entries are an important aspect of livejournal culture, the idea that they won't be taken into account in determing what journals should be purged is just appalling.

[eruthros]

Yes! It should absolutely include posts to communities, and number of comments, in the metric. I'm fine with kicking out the name squatters (no posts, no comments, no posts to communities, no logins), but they just do not seem to get that journals can be important parts of the community even if they're not being used as standard blogs.

I suspect that huge numbers of RPing journals will still be caught up in this, especially since people have gafiated, don't have logins, don't have the same emails, etc.

[sophie]

Hi, random person from the Latest Things page here! (on a tag search for 'wtf')

One thing you might be interested in is that I made a post about it on my LJ that talks about exactly what the news post meant and what the full specification is of the whole thing. Take a look: http://soph.livejournal.com/206549.html . It's got a repost button and it's been making its way around. :)

Hope this helps out. :D

[edit: Oh, and the comments contain more info too that's important. Basically, comments elsewhere won't be deleted; that's only if the user is suspended.]