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

[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.