![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
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.
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.
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.
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).
The second reason this is being done is at the request of the users. Over the past 18 months we have gotten literally thousands of requests to purge inactive accounts. As you know, I have always been one to listen to the community and give them what they want (within reason).
Please don't think you understand everything it takes to run a site with over a million accounts. 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. This means that to keep this place up and running we need to keep costs at a reasonable level. It is very, very expensive to run a cluster of dedicated servers.
I am committed to doing everything that I can to keep this place above water. And this is going to go a long way to help make that happen. I am sorry if you don't see it that way.
I have no doubt what so ever that thousands of rpers who want the BEST USERNAME EVER to go play in a game for two weeks before that game dies and a new one exactly like it pops up, would like it if you purged accounts not logged into every six months. Trading and selling usernames has always been big business on this server. Which, fair enough, but are those five dollar retokens really worth pissing off people who used to buy paid and permanent accounts from you because they believed in you? If so, please carry on. You're not going to be able to please everyone, so you may as well please yourself and the majority of users you feel want this. If this is what you feel you need to do to extend a shelf life on this place, it's your call.
Just like it's my call to not register more accounts. To buy paid accounts at a server I do believe in now. One who doesn't allow the making of cash on trading usernames more important than preserving user content. Don't pretend that while I don't run a server like you do, that I don't get the business aspect of it. I've been writing on servers for a long time, Squeaky. I'm also one of those who always, always, financially supported the sites I'm using bandwidth on. For years I threw cash at your site just like I did to LJ before you. Then there comes a time when I can no longer reconcile the business decisions that are being made, and as a consumer I decide what to do with my money. I seriously doubt the site my group migrated too took business away from here because they don't offer 100 free icons and username trading. What they do offer is making sure user content is protected at all costs. I used to feel you offered the same.
Good luck in keeping it afloat. I've said my peace. I'll save what I can and archive it before the next purge comes up. But as you got those thousands of emails begging for more renames so they can get trading spaces rocking and rolling again for profit, I figured you deserved to know the other opinion of people who tried keeping this place afloat for you too. I'm irritated and disappointed, but I do understand you gotta do what you gotta do.
Just like I do.
You know what you can do, you can go to a web page that has all your content and save it, in it's entirety, right to your computer. It's as simple as right clicking and choosing "Save Page As". No lost icons, no lost text or comments. It will open that page up exactly as it looked when you saved it.
It's your responsibility to save your own information. It's ridiculous to assume any website, whose service is aimed at something other than archival and data storage, should have to do that for you.
Please stop speaking as though your oh so high and mighty opinion is the weight of this entire decision or that the fact that you "threw money at the server" makes any difference. I'm speaking from my own experience, owning two permanent accounts, coming from GJ, and LJ, and being an online blogger for over 7 years. I'm grateful for the service that
once logged in, go to "organize" and scroll down to "import content"
then select "insanejournal.com" and type in your username and your password from this site. you can import your content you're afraid of losing here to that site.
I believe that if you open a support ticket there may be a way to import a community that's only one person's work, like if someone created a community rather than a separate personal journal to house their fic or icons or whatever.