gerg
in
suggestions
Scrub usernames from comments left by deleted and purged journals
Title
Scrub usernames from comments left by deleted and purged journals
Short, concise description of the idea
After a journal has been deleted and purged for a year, the comments that journal left should have the old username removed from them.
Full description of the idea
Because of the increased caching that Google (and other search engines) are doing to LiveJournal pages, a lot of users who delete and purge their accounts are discovering that comments they left on the journals of other users are coming back to haunt them.
While removing those comments can be done through a manual request, it only can be done if the deleted and purged user still has access to one of their validated e-mail addresses, and the process has to be handled by a LiveJournal staffer, which is time-consuming for both the user and staff.
This suggestion is to replace the struckthru username of a deleted and purged user with their user ID number once their journal is purged. (This is done so that if multiple deleted and purged users had commented on a thread, you would be able to differentiate which comments were from who.)
The manual process for requesting comments be completely deleted would still be in place, in case a user had posted information they no longer wished to be on LiveJournal at all, but this should alleviate a lot of the "I typed my username into Google and an "OMG I WISH JEREMY BLOOM WOULD HAVE MY BABIES!!!" comment I made in 2005 showed up!" requests that come up now.
Similar suggestions to this one have been proposed before. This is an extension of several of these ideas (see below:)
Have the option to delete comments and entries in every other journal when your account is deleted and purged -- This suggestion is based mostly off of a compromise suggested by justhuman in that post.
Delete all of your comments in another journal at once
Allow one to go back in time as far as they want to find their comments in other journals.
An ordered list of benefits
- Users would no longer have to worry about old comments they made being associated with their LJ username once they left LJ.
- The userid numbers remaining intact permits discussion to still be followed in a logical flow and to identify who's speaking.
- No content is deleted, preserving the spirit of the original discussion.
- Users who rename to a previously-purged username will not have to endure the confusion of "Are you the same exampleusername that said that horrible stuff about Tom Cruise and sycophantic midgets in examplecomm in 1998?" questions.
- Some users may object to the loss of usernames as a form of identity in comment threads.
- Someone could record everyone's LiveJournal user ID number and then release some big list of who had what ID number at some unspecified point in the future, basically undoing the intent of the suggestion. (Of course, everyone would have to trust that 'someone' wasn't operating with malicious intent, etc.)
- Users who want to be able to Delete Absolutely Everything™ when they delete their LJ account may view this as an unacceptable alternative to having the choice to do so.