![[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.
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/announ
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.
And they aren't being deleted just at request – if you actually read some of Squeaky's comments above, you'd see that this has to do with the actual administration and maintenance of the site itself. Unused journals are a problem from a technical standpoint.
It amazes me that people like you say "there was an easier way..." Really? How would you detect spambots then? Newsflash: spambots usually have entries! Unless you have some magical detection, only deleting spambots would require going by them one-by-one. And given that there are tens of thousands of them, that's a ridiculous expectation.
Bottom line: purges of inactive journals with old entries have occurred before and after the GJ move. If you didn't notice that, it's your problem. It's site policy. It takes 5 seconds to undelete a journal.
That's a really terrifyingly entitled attitude.