azurelunatic | Suggestions Assumptions:

These are some assumptions that may or may not need re-examining. But I'm running into them as I do things in the comm, both in myself and in others. This is very half-baked, but better for me to have it posted rather than keeping sitting on it in drafts.

Deleting abandoned accounts, and what constitutes account abandonment. I get very strong violent reactions to the mere suggestion of someone deleting an abandoned account because they want the motherfucking username, without the permission of the owner. The absolute only way I could see doing this is making the archive available to the authenticated previous owner, and even then, I'm reluctant. Very reluctant.

Crossposting is necessarily a bad thing. (LJ isn't built to handle it, but if LJ were rebuilt from the ground up, it might not be a bad thing.)

Merging two journals would be REALLY REALLY AWESOME.

There's a really strong feeling that a lot of stuff about people should be public, even though a lot of people want a lot of them private, like the profile, and icons. Why is there this strong feeling that it should always be public? What does it matter to someone who is on the same journaling service?

Oh, and community memberships being public.

For a service that's got whole bags of very nicely granular privacy, there's a very strong user-drive for some of the vital nuts and bolts to be public.

Adult content flagging that doesn't mention "adult content", to avoid tripping stuff.

It doesn't matter if they're not going to interact. It will matter if they do interact, and here is how. (IP address-based blocking. Doesn't work for viewing, but I don't care if they use it for commenting in a personal journal.)

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There's an account on my flist that some people might class as abandoned.

The owner died.

I would be pretty upset if someone tried to gank that username.

Has anyone of the next of kin contacted webmaster@ to make it a memorial account?

I have no idea. I'm not close to her family. (Given the situation, probably nobody involved thought of it or knew it was an option.) On the up side, the username is a real name one, and it's not a common name.

But yeah, there are good reasons for not deleting abandoned accounts.

Right now, LJ won't delete users for inactivity. However, there are (isolated but opinionated) people posting to suggestions wanting usernames. Thus my wish for a cluebat of a little higher gauge.

What about all the ones where people were contacted, but there wasn't a way to specially mark it yet and records weren't kept?

Or people like me?

I have set up instructions in case I die. It does not involve LiveJournal, since last I checked, LiveJournal would not recognize my chosen person to handle my journal once I die as having any rights over it. My family doesn't know about my journal, and I don't intend them to. So, it can't be marked. But that doesn't mean it should get deleted on my friends if I were to die.

But beyond that, I'm not sure how you're measuring abandoned. Because not logging in doesn't necessarily mean it is. I have countless hardback journals that I will never write in again. They are not abandoned - they are done. I moved on, but I keep them as part of my history.

Now, if we're talking about the journals with no logins and no entries, then I'd consider it. Just be careful about people who make journals then lose computer access for a few years, but intend to come back to them (the military being the most obvious, but there are other possibilities). But still, if you lose a journal with no entries and you haven't been using it, that doesn't strike me as too bad.

I largely agree on the abandoned accounts issue. I have run into a lot of interesting communities and RP journals that have long since been abandoned, and I would hate to see them summarily deleted. On the other hand, journals that were merely "throwaway" for the purpose of renaming, or those that were never used, updated, or logged into, could possibly be candidates for such deletion. But otherwise, it would be unwise to delete journals for inactivity.

Regarding privacy... to be honest, I have wanted to join a number of comms but didn't because I didn't want to be publicly affiliated with them, nor do I want to create an extra journal for the sole purpose of community participation... too much hassle. And some of my userpics are NSFW or offensive to some other folks, so it'd be nice to make those Friends-only or to flag them as adult content. But... *shrug*

Well, you can use death as a cluebat. It's not *common* yet for LJ users to die, and it's not something the family is likely to think of... and I don't think most of us have thought to put it in a will. (I know my friend didn't. You never think you'll need a will in your 20s...)

There's something sitting in the queue right now where the poster does not define "abandoned" at all, just that she wants it. I felt aggressive.

Like which nuts and bolts?

I get very strong violent reactions to the mere suggestion of someone deleting an abandoned account because they want the motherfucking username, without the permission of the owner.

Definitely. I wanted a username that was created, and only used thrice, in 2004. I tried to contact the owner, got no response, and then I dropped the issue and moved on.

Crossposting is necessarily a bad thing. (LJ isn't built to handle it, but if LJ were rebuilt from the ground up, it might not be a bad thing.)

I could, very easily, build cross-posting into my LJ client. I have specifically chosen not to. (The same goes for some other "features".)

Merging two journals would be REALLY REALLY AWESOME.

Or at least creating a community, and moving some or all of the posts from multiple journals into that community (comments and all), thus preserving who was the original poster of each entry. That would be a good feature; something available to people only if they are the owner of the journal and a maintainer of the community. I'd love to move the posts from multiple journals into a single location.

There's a really strong feeling that a lot of stuff about people should be public, even though a lot of people want a lot of them private, like the profile, and icons.

Why not have a section of the profile visible to the public, and another section visible to friends only?

Oh, and community memberships being public.

Option for community maintainers – hide the membership lists?

Community membership, and lots of the profile.

I know that a friend of a friend has written some pretty powerful moving-shit-around scripts that they use in a *J-based RPG (migrated from LJ to IJ); I'm wondering if something like that couldn't be used for combining multiple journals to a community.

The public/lockable sections of profiles is something that's come up, a lot, in suggestions. It usually gets a really negative response, and I'm sure that a lot of it is knee-jerk "because it isn't done that way" and I'm trying to identify some of those points.

Community membership is another one of those things. The discussion has come up, and it's been rejected or declined, and it also gets a whole lot of negative response without much heavier than "we don't do it that way" again.

Syndicated feeds don't list the people who've subscribed/friended that account, so doing the same for communities is obviously feasible (and sets a precedent for the "we don't do it that way" people).

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