Inactive accounts purge

[charmian]

By now, I'm sure that everyone has heard about how LJ is purging inactive accounts.

See here for a more detailed explanation of what's going on there:
http://soph.livejournal.com/206549.html

Anyway, as currently stated, the purge most likely will not affect most users negatively. It seems the only users positively affected by the change are those seeking to rename to a desired-but-in-use username, although it seems that many of those people aren't satisfied anyway because the username they wanted isn't going to be up for deletion.

I wonder what technical or other benefits the deletion/purgation of inactive user accounts has? Does it somehow reduce the strain on the site?

Comments

[trixieleitz]

It's been requested fairly frequently by the userbase, but I'm not starry-eyed enough to believe that the LJsuits use that criterion as any kind of basis for decision-making ;)

It's been an article of faith for me that it's not the data, it's the bandwidth and database calls that affect site performance; an account that no-one views costs nothing. An account that isn't being updated but that other people still look at costs bandwidth, sure, but it could also generate ad views and new users.

But you know all this anyway :)