Global Expiration Date

[eyenot]

Title
Global Expiration Date
Short, concise description of the idea
A maximum age for all of the journal's entries. Entries any older go kaput.
Full description of the idea
The user sets an expiration date, of say four months and 20 days. Or, to make it easier in math, it could just be a number of days -- like 140, or 356+140=496. At some point, the server checks the user's oldest entry to see if it's older than the expiration date. If it is, the entry is truncated and dies forever. On to the now oldest entry for the same purpose. You could set this by default to something like 365 days, for all new accounts, and tuck it away somewhere. Maximum expiration date is a possibility. As an example of use, I would set my expiration date to like three months and just kick it freestyle from there. Why should I care what I said almost half a year ago? You could use your journal as an easy weekly planner; set the expiration to one week, or eight days for a buffer. Your journal could serve as a daily to-do list or memo-pad in itself; just set the expiration date to one day.
An ordered list of benefits

1. Free up space

2. Free up time

3. Free up the space-time continuum forever! Eureeka!

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

1. "Oops, I wanted to save that one!" -- maybe journal entries that have been placed into memories could be saved or given a 'zero-date': if they are older than the expiration date, they simply exist without a date-time at the bottom of the journal. The user could edit them through the memories, later, and refresh their date or un-memory them.

2. Server load - doing all that work deleting entries. And just when it is supposed to do this checkup?

3. No -- the space-time continuum is mine!

An organized list, or a few short paragraphs detailing suggestions for implementation

i guess some loose psuedocode is in order...

doing_stuff;
open_entries;
while (oldest_entry_is_expired = true)
{
kill_dem_entries;
}
close_entries;
keep_doing_stuff;