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I see via many comments and support tickets that a lot of users were surprised about that timing of the purge happening. I apologize for not being more transparent about the timing of it. We don't like to specify a specific time of an upcoming purge as it can vary by journal and specifying a specific start time has caused issues in the past.
That said we should have announced or put into the notifications for the re-start of the purge that the date would be Saturday 3/18 not exactly 14 days from the date the emails were sent as many users expected it to be. We based that date on giving users an extra 2 weeks from the date the purge was supposed to initially run on due to the outage we incurred.
The original date for accounts to purge was supposed to be March 4th. But since we went offline on 2/27 and had to roll data back to before the purge initially started we obviously didn't purge accounts on that date. When we were finally up and stable enough to restart the purge, we decided to set accounts so they would purge on 3/18, exactly 2 weeks after the original purge and still 10 full days after notifications were set. This allowed users not only the 9 days we were up before the outage, but an additional 10 days after the additional notification to recover their accounts. We felt that this gave users ample time to recover their accounts and included a full weekend before the purge.
The mistake we made was in communication. We did discuss this in a public forum with users, but did not advertise it in either the emails we sent or in any posts about the purge. We admit that this is a mistake on our part and do apologize for it. Unfortunately do to the nature of how purges work, the data in these accounts is not recoverable. In the future we will be sure to provide better information to our users so that you can properly save any accounts that you do not want to be purged.
That said we should have announced or put into the notifications for the re-start of the purge that the date would be Saturday 3/18 not exactly 14 days from the date the emails were sent as many users expected it to be. We based that date on giving users an extra 2 weeks from the date the purge was supposed to initially run on due to the outage we incurred.
The original date for accounts to purge was supposed to be March 4th. But since we went offline on 2/27 and had to roll data back to before the purge initially started we obviously didn't purge accounts on that date. When we were finally up and stable enough to restart the purge, we decided to set accounts so they would purge on 3/18, exactly 2 weeks after the original purge and still 10 full days after notifications were set. This allowed users not only the 9 days we were up before the outage, but an additional 10 days after the additional notification to recover their accounts. We felt that this gave users ample time to recover their accounts and included a full weekend before the purge.
The mistake we made was in communication. We did discuss this in a public forum with users, but did not advertise it in either the emails we sent or in any posts about the purge. We admit that this is a mistake on our part and do apologize for it. Unfortunately do to the nature of how purges work, the data in these accounts is not recoverable. In the future we will be sure to provide better information to our users so that you can properly save any accounts that you do not want to be purged.