Scribbling in the Margins

Heads up, y'all.

According to this entry in news and this post in lj_maintenance, LJ is planning on purging inactive accounts:

# Purging suspended accounts: We expect to start purging suspended accounts by August. The hold-up is that we're still modifying and testing scripts to ensure that all posts--including comments and community entries--associated with suspended accounts are properly purged. For more technical details on how these purges will work, please see this post. We'll let you know when these purged usernames become available.

# EDIT: Purging inactive accounts: One of the benefits of the work we've done to purge suspended accounts is that we will now be able to purge inactive journals and communities too--something you've been requesting for years! A journal is defined as inactive if it has not been logged into for 24 consecutive months and has only one post (i.e., the welcome post). A community is defined as inactive if has not been updated for 24 consecutive months and has only one entry and no comments. Once an account is eligible to be purged for inactivity, the owner will be sent an email to alert them of the inactive status. The owner will then have two weeks to log into the journal or post to their community to prevent it from being deleted. If the owner does not log in or post, the account will be deleted and treated like any other deleted account (the owner will have 30 days to log in and undelete the account to prevent it from being purged). Purging inactive accounts will take place sometime after we've begun purging suspended accounts, probably in late August.

At first glance, this will seem innocuous. Gosh, you know, there are all those abandoned accounts with really sweet usernames lying around; wouldn't it be great to snatch those up and actually use them?

Except think about how many RPs are out there that were fun while they lasted, and that you might go back and revisit once in a while, because they were that much fun.

Think about all those fic exchange comms that had one good round and then went dormant. The fic is still there; it still gets recced and read, but the comm itself is dormant.

Think about people who've left fandom, but let their works stand.

You still okay with a script that will automatically purge all these journals?

If you ever participated in a roleplay, now might be a good time to go log into that account. You don't even have to post! You just need to log in; you could make a private-locked post if you're feeling really paranoid.

You could do the same by posting into one of those dormant comms, too; theoretically that'll be enough.

And spread the word.

[If you're reading this at LJ and would like to import and backup journals and RPs to Dreamwidth, please see Item #2 on today's DW dw_news weekly news post for details on how to arrange that with DW.]