Freeing up deleted usernames for renaming

[denise]

As some folks have noticed: we've actually found some time to run the maintenance script that makes deleted usernames available for re-use! We always swear we're going to do this more regularly and it always winds up getting postponed for something more urgent, so it's been a good while since the last time we've done it, and I apologize.

There's a lot of very long and boring reasons why it gets done so rarely, but the extremely quick explanation is that the system is one of the things that most shows its age (and would be hardest to bring into the 21st century) and needs a lot of manual intervention and babysitting that's really hard to automate: it's hard for us to find the time to do it regularly. (There's also the human factor of it being a combination of "it's annoying and manual and can cause a bunch of load issues" and "it's never hair-on-fire-urgent so we don't need to do it right this second"; no matter how hard we try to stop ourselves from procrastinating on 'ugh' tasks, some of it happens anyway and this is very much one of the ones that is most subject to it.)

If you'd like to rename your account to a username that now shows as "deleted and purged" (or to any other name!), check out How do I change my username? The fee for username changes is to cover the extra system load and support issues that renaming causes: again, it's a really old system and deals with a lot of assumptions that are very baked into the architecture of the site and almost impossible to change, which is why it can be a little confusing to people at times. We've tried our best to make it intuitive, but if you've got questions on how it works or something happens that you didn't expect when you rename your account, drop a support request in the Account Payments category and we'll do our best to give you a hand.

Because this always comes up right about now: if there's a username that you're interested in but the account is not deleted, there's no way to rename to it. Once someone registers a username, it's theirs until they choose to delete it, even if it doesn't look like they're using their account: we don't delete accounts for inactivity. Likewise, a reminder: the rename token system is the only secure way to change your username. Please don't trade or sell accounts or accept a traded or sold account from someone else! A traded account can never be made fully secure and the original owner can always take control of it away from you at any time, plus it carries the risk of being caught up in a Terms of Service enforcement action if the original owner does something severe enough to cause us to suspend all of their accounts on the site.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Thank you. As long as you don't delete the inactive accounts, it's pretty reasonable. When someone dies, and the account is not deleted, it won't be overtaken.

[denise]

Yeah, exactly. There's all kinds of complicated factors you have to balance! Like, it's less common now because global connectivity has improved significantly, but back when I was working for LiveJournal, we always called one of the scenarios we'd use to test policy proposals the 'Christine' test: we had a volunteer named Christine who went to volunteer with the Peace Corps, and for those two years she was deployed she could only log in once or twice a year, had no real access to email, etc, etc. So any time anyone brought up a suggestion for a way to reclaim inactive accounts, we'd be like "okay, but the specifics of your proposal would mean Christine would have come back from her volunteer deployment and found her account was gone", heh. People suggest all kinds of ways to reclaim usernames from people who aren't actively using them, but there are just so many scenarios where that is a bad idea that we eventually went "we could maybe prevent MOST of these bad outcomes but it would take a lot of effort and the risk of getting it wrong is high enough, and the impact to someone if we did get it wrong would be bad enough, that we're just not going to go there".

[the_beasts]

thankyou very much for this decision not to delete for inactivity, and for putting that much thought into it.

for us personally, this is a very important accessibility feature, and one of the reasons dreamwidth is one of the few sites we can use. our disabilities mean we can go years at a time unable to log on to somewhere due to severe lack of spoons, or too mentally nonfunctional to remember things exist (even big things like the concept of email).

plus, the way our plurality functions (since we're a gateway) means that people who may want their own personal journals, might be away in their home universe for years on end and unable to visit our shared brain/body here in this universe (mostly due to the shared brain's limited bandwidth & the scheduling restrictions of everyone having to share access to a single brain here). but it also means their personal records on their own journal are deeply important to them and all of us, because our shared brain can't store that level of detailed information about who someone is and who they make friends with here and what they do in their life for several thousand people concurrently, so our individual journals are often the only way we have of reminding our own brain of who we even are. so it's a huge accessibility thing for plural reasons too.

...all of which is to say, we deeply appreciate the reliability, accessibility and sense of safety that is dreamwidth's decision not to delete for inactivity. thankyou. <3

[denise]

The only caution is that if you lose the password to an account, you need to be able to receive email at any email address you've ever confirmed on the account in order to reset it -- the fact that we don't collect a lot of personal information means that being able to receive email at an address you've previously confirmed is yours is the only way we can confirm you're the one who owns the account except in a few very rare situations that don't often apply. So if you lose access to an email address, be sure to update your accounts to your new email address as soon as possible to avoid the risk of forgetting the passwords and not being able to get back into the account.

[cellio]

Yeah, there is no reason to go through that to "save" some maybe-abandoned names. Names are not a limited resource, and nobody is entitled to a name just for liking it. Sorry, but there can only be one "denise" and it's in use; other Denises will just have to be "denise_lastname" or "denise2" or "the_other_denise" or whatever. Be creative! Find an unclaimed name that is "you"!

[attackpatternbattista]

As someone who basically vanished for a few years because my life got upended due to stress, I really appreciate this.

[denise]

Yeah, I've seen it happen a billion times! (And, like, have done it myself on some sites.) We do our best to think of the long term as much as possible whenever we can.

[evalerie]

I moderate a system where people will leave for years and eventually come back and reclaim their own account -- sometimes a surprisingly long number of years. We used to delete people for inactivity, but I stopped, because I want people to be able to come back to their own accounts, similar to how you wanted people like Christine to be able to go away to the Peace Corps and be able to come back years later to continue using their old account. Also, on the system I moderate, it's just weird to have someone new start using someone else's username -- it feels like taking over someone else's identity. Also, the system I moderate is set up so that a new person re-using an old username would have author access to the old person's postings, and that could lead to all kinds of undesirable things happening.

So, anyway, what I am saying is that I support not deleting accounts for inactivity!

[denise]

Yeah, we've had people who made their account in the initial rush after opening and then come back like a decade later and start using the site! The only caution is that if you lose your password, you have to still be able to get email at the email address that you registered with (or any other email address you confirmed on the account) in order to get the password reset email, because our minimal personal data collection means we can't do any kind of identity verification except in extremely rare circumstances.

[brightsocks]

I think you misunderstand what people mean when they ask for purging. Accounts that have content on them and just aren't used anymore are fine, nobody wants you to delete those. We believe in internet preservation. When people ask for purging, we mean accounts that have zero comments, zero entries, and were never logged in again after creation.

[denise]

Every scenario where someone identifies some class of accounts that are being "unused" inherently includes accounts that are being used by the owner in ways that are not visible from the outside, accounts that the owner intends to use but just hasn't gotten around to it yet, and a whole bunch of scenarios where someone registered the account for defensive purposes, such as preventing their stalker from maliciously impersonating them with the username they use on other sites, etc. Trying to sort out all those scenarios from "throwaway account that will legitimately never be used" is impossible without there being major collateral damage! It's far, far better for everyone for sites to have a bright-line policy of "once someone registers a username, it's theirs to keep until and unless they choose to delete it".

[james]

Thank you for all your hard work!

[paserbyp]

"Please don't trade or sell accounts or accept a traded or sold account from someone else!"

How about inheritance from someone who passed away?

[bastun]

So access to be able to post as someone who has passed, and the ability to read the private, limited access or locked-down journal posts they had made, under the assumption nobody would be able to read them?

How about not?

[the_beasts]

we personally very much want our sibling to have access to all our locked & private dreamwidth posts if we pass before they do. it's very important to us and we intend to include that permission (or more like request honestly) in our will if we can ever get one written. we imagine that's more what the person above was asking about? to our understanding, inheriting something generally implies consent from the passed party, though we could be mistaken.

(but yes, we strongly agree that without consent, that would be a big problem and a huge privacy violation. and that if someone were to deceptively post as the passed person, rather than adopt the account with the passed person's consent and openly announce the change in ownership, then that would also be an issue, you're right.)

[paserbyp]

Agreed. Also, it depends if it is paid account…

[denise]

If you'd like to have any kind of arrangement like that for your account, the best way to do it is to include your password (or the password to your email account so they can reset your DW password) in your estate planning documents -- for instance, my wife and I both have the master passwords to our password managers in our files so anyone settling our affairs will be able to handle our online accounts as well. We don't require any personal information or identity verification when someone opens an account, so there's no way for us to verify that a user has passed away or that the person contacting us has legal authority over their affairs. We do have the ability to set accounts to "memorial" status, which indicates that the account is a memorial and the owner has passed away, and we'll apply that status when we're contacted by someone's next of kin, but we won't give out any access to the account, its contents, its login, etc.

[paserbyp]

Thank you and good to know.

[slaymesoftly]

Thanks for doing and explaining this - as well as not deleting accounts that appear to be inactive. I do have one account that there is no longer a big need for (FB being what it is), but I would hate to lose what's one there and would certainly like heads up if it was in danger of being deleted so I could get some of it off before it went away.

[ai]

Thank you for running the process. I remember asking about them before in support tickets years ago back when I was roleplaying so I was on a constant hunt for deleted names, but since I have less reasons now to use renames, I hadn't realized how long it had been. I snagged a new username last night to do something with though :D

I hope the sales from renames are a nice extra boon to make up for the work. You all deserve it ♥

[house_wren]

Thank you for your work!

[sine_nomine]

Thanks for this! I was stunned to realize I still have my nom de LJ here (with those entries, apparently) but locked down so well that I never gave myself access (!). Very glad it's not gone though I will have to figure out how to get it back, so to speak.

[bastun]

Thanks for all your dedication and hard work, and for not taking the easy options!

[kore]

YAY for not deleting inactive sccounts, especially after that awful Gmail/Google news.

[pangolin20]

I was already wondering when this would happen, so good to hear you've had the chance to do it.

As for retaining inactive accounts, you're quite right! The only way to really be for sure would be to ask these people personally, is quite invasive, and even then, they might well decide to dust it off again in the future.

(Just for fun, I see that the amount of available usernames is about 1,56 * 10^39, so there will always be something to pick.)

[sine_nomine]

Nope, but they can be in the middle! *wink*

[pangolin20]

Yep, the greatest part of my communities and people have those! I'd never thought about where the hyphens/underscores could come, but now I know.

Since we're being pedantic...

[pauamma]

You can't have 2 consecutive underscores.

Re: Since we're being pedantic...

[pangolin20]

Is there somewhere we can find these precise rules? I certainly think it'd be nice to know!

Re: Since we're being pedantic...

[pauamma]

https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=273 (if you can read regular expressions, there's also a list at https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/blob/main/htdocs/inc/reserved-usernames).

Re: Since we're being pedantic...

[pangolin20]

Oops, read over that. Thanks for the whole list!

[bens_dad]

Can you confirm whether this will give the new owner access to anything that the original owner had access to via the account and mechanisms like OpenID and OpenAuth ?

If so, you need to include a big, clear warning (that includes the details) in the instructions when and for deleting an account.

BIG SCARY WORDS. THIS MEANS THAT SOMEONE ELSE WILL GET ACCESS TO BITS OF THE INTERNET THAT TRUSTED THE ACCOUNT WHEN THE ORIGINAL OWNER HAD IT. MORE BIG SCARY WORDS.

[denise]

I don't remember the exact technical details, but I remember the system taking that into account.

[delight]

Since several people have for some reason asked me, I'm just clarifying: there's no list of recently purged names like LJ had, correct?

[denise]

That's correct! We've chosen not to do anything like that because it would constantly be changing as usernames got re-registered and it would be a pain in the freaking ass to take all the scenarios that could cause something to be wrongly listed into account.

[kaeleersheart]

Done by fellow users of DW but there is this deleted

[kaeyko]

I'm very relieved to hear that inactive accounts will not be deleted to open up those usernames to be claimed by others. I have another account that I created for working on writing projects which I haven't used as often in some time, but I want to continue to have it available in the future when I have the mental resource space to be creative again.

(Just curious, but what would constitute lack of activity? I do use the aforementioned account for commenting in writing communities, so I do log in periodically, but I haven't created any new posts in that journal for a while. Would commenting with the account still count as activity for that account?)