Insanejournal deleting inactive accounts.

[charmian]

Insanejounal is having a username purge. I have a largely inactive account at IJ, so it was placed in deletion mode, but undeleting it is a pretty simple and painless process. Squeaky, the admin/owner of IJ, claims that he has decided to do this because a) many accounts are spam, and b) because he receive "thousands" of messages asking for the deletion of inactive accounts. He gives more information about the username purge here.

Much of the reaction to his decision, both positive and negative, comes from roleplayers. Some welcome the purge because it puts less strain on IJ, and because they want some of the purged usernames. Others are upset that journals of inactive roleplayers will be purged.

(Personally speaking... since this isn't the first time Squeaky has deleted inactive accounts, and it's IIRC stated in the IJ faqs, I don't have much of a problem with it. I have a domain name and webhosting. If I stopped paying for that, I wouldn't expect them to keep it up; similarly, if I stop "paying" for an IJ account by not frequenting the site, I feel I'd have to accept the consequences of that also... Perhaps a way this issue could be dealt with is the creation of a mechanism to transfer ownership of accounts?)

Comments

[yvi]

I think 2 weeks is a ridiculously short time to have for the undeletion. I have been on quite a few holidays longer than that.

[charmian]

What do you think is a better amount of time?

[yvi]

At least a month, possibly two.

[dingsi]

similarly, if I stop "paying" for an IJ account by not frequenting the site, I feel I'd have to accept the consequences of that also

If the actual account holders were the only ones visiting their journal that would be true, but that isn't the case, especially not with fannish artwork or texts. Just as one example, I know of fic writers who don't update their IJ accounts anymore but still get comments from people who followed a link or simply prefer reading on IJ.

[charmian]

Isn't it the same thing if I hosted my fanfiction on my webhosting account, and I stopped paying for it, and then my host deleted all of my content? The people who visited my site would miss out.

Seems like IJ's future is fairly precarious however, so the fate of the accounts that survive this purge is also uncertain.

[dingsi]

I was specifically referring to if I stop "paying" for an IJ account by not frequenting the site -- a lot of people are frequenting the site/specific journal even if the initial account holder may not, so the "payment" does not stop automatically just because updates for that journal did.

[charmian]

The "payment," though, doesn't count unless it is the account holder. In both cases, the terms are between the person with the account and the site itself, and anyone else who visits the account doesn't count. The other people "pay" for their own account by frequenting the site (IJ itself). The journal doesn't seem to count, as it seems that IJ doesn't require you to update or visit your journal in particular (I think?) just login to the site, and even leaving comments on other people's journals seems to count as well.

So, in the metaphor, it's like simply because person B is paying for an account on the WhateverHost.com, that doesn't mean that their payment covers person A's as well.

[dingsi]

I think we're talking past each other.

[foxfirefey]

It would probably help a lot if there was a way for people to mark other journals (or communities? don't know if they are included in this purge, people act like they are but I'm not sure they are) as not purge. If the main thrust of this is to get rid of inactive spam journals, saving the journals people actually read (even if they don't own them) would help.

[foxfirefey]

This bit fascinates me:

It is very expensive and the fact that some other sites that had funding ahead of time to do it the way we always wanted to have popped up and taken a lot of our traffic away has hurt us.

Because it sounds like it's alluding to Dreamwidth except we didn't have funding ahead of time at all, unless you count the owner's credit cards as funding, so I wonder what site's being talked about there.

[charmian]

Squeaky said IIRC that communities aren't.

[pne]

Some welcome the purge because it puts less strain on IJ

How so?

How does the mere existence of my journal put *any* strain on IJ?

That seems like a completely bogus argument to me.

If people visit it a lot, then sure, IJ has to pay for bandwidth to serve the content and userpics. But just sitting there? I don't buy it. Then it just takes up a bit of space on disk somewhere, and *maaaybe* in some database server's RAM cache, but I doubt the latter.

[charmian]

I have no idea what the truth is, but Squeaky (owner/admin of IJ) is claiming this:

"There are two reasons this is being done, the first is that 99% of these inactive accounts were created by bots to be used as spam accounts. This takes up a lot of resources on the servers and, as you probably know resources cost money. Freeing up this space is going to allow us to continue to operate at the current cost structure and not be forced into decisions like permanent account sales, which we are committing to running less of (maybe 2 times a year at most)."

http://asylums.insanejournal.com/announcements/83654.html?thread=4290758#t4290758

I guess you can ask him if you want more technical details?