InsaneJournal Announcements

Username Purge

InsaneJournal Announcements

Username Purge

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We are officially beginning our next username purge immediately. We are going to be setting any account that has been inactive since January 1st, 2010 to a deleted status. The accounts will have a 2 week period before their accounts are purged via the normal nightly purge process. We will not be posting a time when this purge will occur, nor will we be posting a list of purged accounts. If you receive an email stating your account was deleted, you have 2 weeks to log in and undelete the account. Please be aware that even though you don't see any posts or comments on an account, activity can be as simple as logging into the site or looking at your friends' page.

As asylums do not have an associated email address and usage is not as easily tracked, we are not going to include them in this purge. As always if you find an asylum that is inactive and you would like to take over maintainership, open a support request as there is a process to handle this.

These will be handled on a case by case and first come first serve basis.
  • I shouldn't be as excited for this as I am, but hey. Maybe some of those 'haha i never trade this suck it up' usernames will be open for some proper usage finally.
  • Very cool. Although the one screenname I'm after last updated: 2010-04-10 13:23:43, 56 weeks ago. Damn. LOL
  • I see this also includes names abandoned during name change. The warning e-mail gave me a bit of a fright! :P

    Do not delete this journal, please!
  • (Anonymous)
    do you give out emails to everyone all at once or does it go in a certain order? i'm just wondering because i haven't gotten any yet/none of my journals have been deleted
  • Great news
  • good post

    i will support you forever
  • Are there any memorial journals that might be exempt from this? I don't know of any off-hand, but if there are any deceased users who had journals here it could be a good thing to avoid purging them for inactivity.
  • Does this include journals that have made posts and/or comments, just no activity since Jan 1, 2010?
  • Would you please NOT send the passwords in CLEAR TEXT when sending out those notifications?!

    Anyone with a bit of sense knows that this is a security risk. But then again, this is IJ, why should I be looking for sanity?
  • The fact this is being done on accounts less than two years since a login, and includes accounts that obviously have been in use at some point. AKA they have entries, or belong to comms with entries and clearly show they participated with comments, and are already in a DELETED state when the email comes out, just says so much about why your site is now a joke. I used to be a huge advocate for giving you and IJ a real chance. Then I've watched as things slowly got worse and worse, with no real permanent fixes beyond let's do yet another permanent account sale to help pay those bills. I'm so annoyed that accounts that I used to write in, via the journal or in comms, may end up purged now because I don't even know if it's attached to an email I got rid of after it was hacked.

    This is clearly being done so you can free up usernames so people can go sell them for profit, and lmfao God really, again, it speaks volumes about your true commitment to this server and it's users. I've logged in and saved what I could. Just a note, maybe next time, do it at 2 years, don't include journals that obviously have been used, and might be being kept for personal reasons even if a game has died off. You may want to not time it during finals too next time, but you know, whatever. I'll be shocked if IJ isn't the GJ route before next time anyway.

    tl;dr I remember when you and this server was a classy place to support, and wow am I glad I send my money now to a server who actually appreciates it's users over selling off renames tokens for profits. Peace out.
  • I have about a million and one journals on here, I still use them all for something, but how am I supposed to know which ones I'v been on since Jan 1. Is there a way could e-mail the verification email when its going to be deleted?
  • Jesus Christ, some people are such complete assholes that I can’t even deal. Thanks for the purge, dude, and everything else.
  • If a user name is purged, what happens to the comments made by it in a community? Do they disappear?
  • I just got emails about deletions, but they didn't come with the passwords, so I did password retrieval (about 20 mins ago) nothing yet. How long before I should try again? And is there a reason one account came w/ the password but two others didn't?
  • I don't understand why I got the email, I have been using my account and I have used it between January 1st 2010 and now so why am I getting any email at all? You might want to make sure it's counting the friends only entries or something. I'm not sure why I got the email.
  • I think it makes absolute sense to delete empty journals, but I really don't like that this applies to journals with entries in them. Some of those journals have memories of people who no longer use the website and probably don't care enough to log in.
  • (Anonymous)
    you people are whining about your journals getting deleted or how you might have forgotten a journal that is important to you and now it'll be purged -- if it's so important, you'd remember the un and if you want to keep it so bad, LOG IN AND UNDELETE IT. he's sending you emails WITH THE PASSWORD and giving you AMPLE time to save your journal if you feel like doing so. it isn't like he's deleting them and automatically purging them right after, leaving you no chance to save something you might possibly want to hang on to nor is he asking you to go upload icons, make posts or do anything SUBSTANTIAL to prove the account is active. all it takes to keep your journal is logging in and if it's been deleted, undelete it.

    how about instead of bitching and whining about nothing you try doing the simple things it'd take to fix your "problems". on a lighter note, thanks for doing this, squeaky.
  • I've gotten a few emails about journals that are going to be deleted/purged, and for the most part I know that they're ones I don't use anymore. I wanted to double check that there was nothing in them that I truly needed, however- but when I log into them, I can't see any of the journal's entries or content. So is my only option to un-delete them, save my content, and then manually re-delete the journals? Just want to be sure I'm looking at this correctly. Thanks!
  • Just want to say I am totally supportive of this decision. As a long term IJ user, I understand this helps you guys not only with space, but with costs as well. Some people do not seem to understand that this website is not their personal storage unit. If they have writing they want to save, they shouldn't rely on this website to do so, not unless they have purchased a permanent account for their archival purposes.
  • If someone wanted to use one of the purged UNs, is there a way to create a journal using a rename token, instead of registering a throw-away name and then using the token? Or if you're renaming with a purged account, is there no problem of creating an "ex_hjfjfd" journal?
  • Well I'm certainly confused. I just got one of those emails, yet there are plenty of entries after the given date, and more than a handful this year. How does that count as being inactive?

    My account was still showing as active, so I "changed" the status to reiterate that, but now I wonder if I'm going to have to keep checking over the next two weeks (assuming I remember to) and change it back for real this time simply because mine hasn't been gotten to you to mark it for deletion.

    Is it because I use Semagic to make my posts? But then, that does log you into the account. It couldn't make entries otherwise. It seems whatever it being used to determine which accounts are inactive isn't entirely up to par for the job.
  • The laziness of people astounds me. I had about 50 old roleplay journals set for deletion and it took me like 5 minutes to undelete them. I'm pretty sure most of you can manage that once every two years.
  • Well, I'd rather not have my journal deleted, since I still use it to comment on one or two friends' journals, but I did delete over 100 userpics (all but one of them), in case that helps with space-clearing so that dramatic delete-and-purges won't be needed in the future. I could do the same thing with my entries (they've been backed up), but I'm wondering how useful that would be. Does removing entries actually free up space, or just removing entire accounts? (Even if I did delete this account, I would just need to start up an OpenID account, so as to keep up with people here.)
  • After the 84 emails I've received on and off today (and god knows I'm likely to receive more as the purge continues) while I've been at work, I would just like to add in my two cents in that this was handled horribly. The accounts have already been deleted before we go to reactivate them. We were given absolutely no warning that this was going to occur. Whether or not you posted about the purge in this asylum makes no difference. Many of your users do not read this community on a regular basis. There should have been some sort of email sent out to your users several days, if not weeks, ahead of time. When I signed up and moved many of my journals here to IJ, I gladly supported the site with my money and referrals to others.

    There are journals I use, have used, and will likely use again. Do I use them all at the same time? No. Of course not. As I said, I received 84 today alone. Many of these journals had content that I wished to preserve. When I signed up to IJ, there was never a thought in my mind that the content would be deleted simply because I had no logged into the journal less than a year and a half ago. Personally, I believe it should be more than two years for a deletion, and the those with content should never be deleted.

    Who cares if a number of users complained because they wanted a specific username? Too bad, right? It's their problem, not yours. Whenever I've come across a username I've liked and come to find out have seen it taken, sure I'll be disappointed but someone else registered it. Do I get annoyed that it's empty? Possibly. But still, there are plenty of other usernames out there that are just a click away from registering. Yes, this is a business and you can run it how you see fit, but this is absurd. I've checked back in the FAQs to see if there was any information about this from the past, but all I found in relation to it was this which was clearly updated recently given the purge:

    InsaneJournal administration will not delete a journal or asylum due to inactivity on request. There will be site purges when deemed necessary by adminstration.

    Even though it may appear that a user is no longer updating their journal, this can be misleading; the user might be making Friends-Only posts, or simply use the account for reading friends' posts and commenting on them. Some users also find themselves without Internet access for prolonged periods of time, but will continue with their journal at a later date.

    InsaneJournal normally would not delete a journal for inactivity. However, due to the large amount of users that have migrated to the site in comparison to the number of inactive journals from earlier years, site administration has decided to purge older inactive accounts. More information on this process can be found in the recent announcements asylum at the following link:
    http://asylums.insanejournal.com/announcements/43568.html


    Yes, you have stated that site purges will be made at the consent of the administration. No where have you given a time frame. In fact, this leads me to believe (before the most recent update with a link to this post, of course) that you aren't likely to do them. To say that this was done to get rid of spam bots is ridiculous given the amount of journals that are being deleted. If you wanted to jump on the bots to get rid of them, there were MUCH easier and more efficient ways to go about this.

    Obviously, this comment is pointless as the purge has already begun and will not stop until you're finished with it. I don't have any reason to believe otherwise given your responses to others who have expressed concern over the issue. But, since you're so concerned with your user base's opinions and have said more than once that this is a reason you're conducting the purge, I figured I'd give my opinion on the matter.
  • Just here to say I really, really dislike the way this was done. No notice, immediately setting journals to deleted, only two weeks to fix things? It's not courteous, not professional, and I really expected better.

    And for those of you in the comments?
    • Yes, when I post something I do expect it to be around forever. That's why this is a journalling site with a working archive.
    • It's not just about my content. I read more than I post, always, and there are things on IJ that I'm very fond of but didn't make myself. No notice means I can't even save them if they get purged.
    • Two weeks isn't actually all that long. It's quite possible to be without internet for that long, for any number of reasons, and having no notice about this means that things can get deleted that no one wants to be.
    • Usernames: not the be-all and end-all of the world. Seriously.
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