azurelunatic | Sky not falling yet

http://news.livejournal.com/127507.html went out earlier today with some inaccurate information about the criteria for purging inactive journals. That entry has been edited; as of 22:24 2010 July 14 (Pacific Daylight Time) the associated

lj_maintenance entry (http://community.livejournal.com/lj_maintenance/128843.html) hasn't been, and still makes reference to outdated information.

Inactive users and communities will be notified that unless they take action (logging in, posting entries) they will be deleted & purged -- however, "inactive" is very narrowly defined in the actual plan.

The account must be (if a personal journal) not logged into, for 24 consecutive months; a community must go without new entries for 24 consecutive months. Users will be notified before this happens; community maintainers and moderators will be notified. Additionally, only journals with either zero entries or the single automatic entry that LiveJournal started posting to new accounts, will be affected. If a journal has more than one entry in it, it's safe. If a journal has only one entry in it, and it's something other than the automatic text supplied by LJ, it's safe. The feature isn't fully developed yet. Stay tuned to official LJ sources (which I am not).

Historically important stuff is therefore likely to be safe, unless somehow a world-shattering conversation broke out in the comments of someone's automatic first post (and those tended to actually be automatically posted privately, so immensely unlikely).

This also means that the people who were pleased by the thought that the person with three entries from 2001 who has that awesome username but hasn't touched their journal since 2001, will actually be in for a disappointment.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Just one thing I'm still not clear on, though: what is all this about deleting comments and community entries of purged journals that I read about in

lj_maintenance? O_o I'm not sure if they just mean for suspended users, or for anyone whose journal is purged. Any ideas?

Also, thanks for rejecting my suggestion regarding the Frank!fic. XD I didn't know they were actually going to do that anyway, but I can hardly say I'm unhappy about it. XDDDDD

And... ganking this for my journal, thanks! :3

I'm still waiting on confirmation on that point myself -- I hear through unofficial channels that it's only for suspended users, but I'll still feel better when I see an official entry or comment on that front.

I didn't know about the Frank!fic either until the news post, but that made me very happy.

I didn't know about the Frank!fic either until the news post, but that made me very happy.

SO MUCH WORD.

I don't know why they're all so fired up about deleting content posted by suspended users. There are other people who can very easily delete offensive entries in communities they maintain or offensive comments to their journals, and the suspended user might have posted other content that those people want to keep.

I think the thing is twofold:

1) d's phrasing was such that it was a reasonable to think that all purged accounts would have their community entries and out-of-journal comments obliterated, not just suspended accounts.

2) possibly misunderstanding the nature of suspension and what it already does to entries and comments: as Support volunteers tend to know, once a user is suspended, all their comments and entries everywhere go invisible to the average user. If someone thought that a suspended user's entries and comments outside of their own journal remained visible, then they might be annoyed. However, as this is not actually the case...

I might have not been clear - by "they" I meant SUP/LJInc/whoever is making these decisions. Sure, if a user is suspended, their journal goes away, fair enough. But depending on the reason for their suspension, it might not be reasonable for everything they posted to the site ever to be vanished as well. Sure, some of these people are spammers. But some are (former) active participants in the LJ community, who may have taken part in interesting commentservations or posted thoughtful entries in communities. I think it should be up to the owners of the journals or comms they participated in (who do have the means to delete the content if they want) to decide if the suspended user's contributions go away. Especially if that means that half a conversation vanishes.

Hmm.

That's actually not a decision that I'm comfortable having either made in general at High Corporate or community maintainer level, but I would not be opposed to it if a journal-only suspension (mimics deletion in that the user's journal goes away but their out-of-journal content remains) was added to the Abuse Team's toolbox, if Abuse management decided that was something they could use usefully.

The code says that this will only happen for suspended users, so I believe there's no problem there.

Replying to you, because Azz will see it, too. =)

Thanks for checking into that! :D That's what I figured also, because it makes sense. We can't see comments or entries from suspended journals, so there's no point in keeping them around once they're purged. But yeah, like what Azz said, more official word would be preferable, but for now, this will do. :3

And I also seem to recall things that became issues when community maintainers banged into entries and comments that they could neither see nor manipulate from suspended users.

I'm pleased that the mysterious

t from 2001 will stay :)

Thanks for the info -- a TON! I can't tell you how much I trust YOU, and this really puts my mind at ease.

I've got a lot of older journals that aren't currently active that I still read -- I suspect many of us who've been around a long time do. And being a part of fandom (so many different fandoms), the idea of losing any fanfic or FEEDBACK is appalling -- and lots of communities go inactive over time...

Anyway, I didn't panic, but I'll try not to rant. (grin)

(hugs)

And further information from Sophie: http://azurelunatic.livejournal.com/6558387.html

Sky not falling yet

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject