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

[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*