World of Wol and The Name Scarcity Problem
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmianBTW, manticore created ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
world_of_wol, a comm dedicated to posting owl pics and videos. So, if you like videos related to owls, feel free to join and even post.
Anyway, apropos of the recent rash of people registering community names in order to sell them later (namescalping, I suppose), I was reminded of a discussion on the DW ML. People were debating whether DW should delete accounts for inactivity etc, because of the situation on LJ where desirable usernames are, at times, taken up by someone who has never used the account, or to all appearances has abandoned it. For the record, the DW owners will not delete accounts for inactivity.
This is something which has also been a topic of heated discussion on the LJ suggestions comm. Some advocate renaming empty or seemingly abandoned accounts. While I can see how this might work with comms which have no friends, no entries, and have never commented, I don't think it should be done with accounts that have been used in any fashion.
Also, I wish people wouldn't create accounts merely to prevent the name being used by someone else, especially if it is a nick conceivably used by someone else on the internets (and yeah, probably someone else on the internets is using your nick). I think it would be too difficult to set up a rule to prevent this, but if you're not going to use a service in any way, you should allow someone else who wants the name to use it. (Impersonation is a separate issue, and clearly against DW TOS, so I'm sure they will deal strictly with it when it occurs).
Randomly, I thought of a way for people who can't use LJarchive to deal with the "can't search your own journal on LJ problem." They should import into wordpress.com their LJ, and then use the search function there to find things.
manticore created world_of_wol, a comm dedicated to posting owl pics and videos. So, if you like videos related to owls, feel free to join and even post. Anyway, apropos of the recent rash of people registering community names in order to sell them later (namescalping, I suppose), I was reminded of a discussion on the DW ML. People were debating whether DW should delete accounts for inactivity etc, because of the situation on LJ where desirable usernames are, at times, taken up by someone who has never used the account, or to all appearances has abandoned it. For the record, the DW owners will not delete accounts for inactivity.
This is something which has also been a topic of heated discussion on the LJ suggestions comm. Some advocate renaming empty or seemingly abandoned accounts. While I can see how this might work with comms which have no friends, no entries, and have never commented, I don't think it should be done with accounts that have been used in any fashion.
Also, I wish people wouldn't create accounts merely to prevent the name being used by someone else, especially if it is a nick conceivably used by someone else on the internets (and yeah, probably someone else on the internets is using your nick). I think it would be too difficult to set up a rule to prevent this, but if you're not going to use a service in any way, you should allow someone else who wants the name to use it. (Impersonation is a separate issue, and clearly against DW TOS, so I'm sure they will deal strictly with it when it occurs).
Randomly, I thought of a way for people who can't use LJarchive to deal with the "can't search your own journal on LJ problem." They should import into wordpress.com their LJ, and then use the search function there to find things.
