Mailer Daemon / Failed Delivery Test For Inactive Accounts

[understandastar]

Title
Mailer Daemon / Failed Delivery Test For Inactive Accounts

Short, concise description of the idea
Send a mass e-mail to inactive accounts. For those where a mailer daemon / failed delivery message is received back, flag the journal for deletion.

Full description of the ideaThere are currently 22,025,963 accounts that are not active in any way

Comments

[lied_ohne_worte]

No. I've been doing Support for several years, and one of the most common requests we got was the "I haven't logged in for years, and my email is not up to date, how do I log in?" one. Additionally, there are quite a lot of users who are using their account in "invisible" ways, like for example to read the friends list, and who do not have a working email address any more because they don't care about notifications. One other type of request we often got was: "I've always been automatically logged in, but now I have a new computer, and I don't know the password, and I don't have an email address", which shows that people like this do exist.

Letting abandoned accounts exist does no harm. Deleting them might delete content which users still want to use, and will potentially cause more harm and annoy many people very much.

I think the only accounts that could possibly be deleted should be those that have no activity whatsoever: no friends, no entries, no comments, no log-in in years. As soon as an entry has any content, it should be safe from deletion.

[azurelunatic]

Internally, LJ would be able to create tools to determine whether a user is logged-in-active (versus logged out and just using their friends list as an aggregator to read public content) because LJ has the ability to display to users their own logged-in active sessions. If there has been no activity (I can't remember off the top of my head what LJ considers "activity") in 60 days, even for a "remember me" login session, the login session expires. If a user does not currently have a logged-in active session, and has not had one in X amount of time, LJ can be sure that they're not logged-in invisible users. I don't know what logic is currently used to move people to the inactive cluster, but I imagine something like this might be involved. (Brad said, some years ago, that it was 6 months to a year of inactivity. http://community.livejournal.com/lj_maintenance/60984.html)

To determine if a logged-out inactive account is getting any sort of action, we would then have to turn to server logs. I'm not familiar enough with LJ's back end to know what sort of stuff is currently stored, nor what already is built, but some of it has to be expensive enough that this should not be done regularly or lightly or for a lot of users at once. We would have to look at basically everything in that user's subdomain: journal (lastn view), calendar listings, specific archive dates, single entry/comment page views, profile, and friends page.

I was originally thinking that to attempt to determine whether the logged-out user was reading their own journal or friends page, that you would have to first determine that the user had no active sessions and therefore could not be viewing their journal from within the account, then analyze the logs for any given page and weed out those that belonged to the logged-in sessions of other users. What was left would be anonymous accesses, which might or might not conceal visits from the account owner.

Then I realized that it doesn't matter so much. An account owner might have another account they're currently logged into. An anonymous visitor might be there for other content or other reasons. Only if no-one, not even the Google spider, loads pages on their subdomain (or, well, area, if one has one of those old names that can't be used with subdomains) for a significant amount of time would we be assured that (currently) the account is completely out of use.

(If my babbling makes no sense, please ask: it's post-Thanksgiving and I'm literally falling asleep at the keyboard.)

[kayt_arminta]

What about those that are dead and we keep their journals up for a shrine? What about those that lose internet connection for a few months because they have money to pay for it. Just no. No deletion of old journals, it causes more heartache and headache than deleting them.

[azurelunatic]

I am personally against deleting inactive journals.

If they ever made a policy to allow deleting inactive journals, that policy would have to exclude accounts in memorial status from being deleted. (If you're not familiar with it, family and friends of a user who has died can email Support and an admin or employee can change the status of the journal; the account type will then say "Memorial" on the profile.)

If it did happen, I don't think a few months is sufficient time either.

[badmoviescene]

I think a valid criterion for deleting old journals would be how recently they have been logged into: if they haven't even been logged into in, say, 2 years, I think it would be reasonable to consider them inactive.

I myself have a few old LJ accounts that I haven't logged into in over 3 years, some in 5 years. I'd love to just delete them, but I can't remember their passwords, and the e-mail addresses I used for them are inactive. What bothers me about the accounts just being left up dormant on the site is that my personal information is on the profiles of the accounts, and I'm uncomfortable with my information being left up on the net like that. I know this is also the case for a few friends of mine; they have years-old accounts that they have no interest in keeping anymore and would like to delete, but can't because they have no way of accessing the account anymore.

This for me is the main reason why I support inactive account deletion; so that information that a person would rather not have on display does not remain up for all to see on a dormant account on some website, with virtually no way for the person to remove it.

As for accounts that are kept as memorials, I think that 'memorial status' is a great idea. That way it separates the people who want to keep up their old LJs (or others') out of sentimentality, and people who just have no interest in keeping their accounts anymore.

I know that some people take a hiatus from the net or simply become forgetful, and I agree that a few months is not a reasonable amount of time to give someone until their account is deleted, but surely it's not unreasonable for something to be done about accounts that haven't even been logged into in several years? Especially taking into consideration the privacy and security of members, who may have information up on their old accounts that they would like to get rid of. Not to mention the countless numbers of accounts that once registered were simply abandoned with no activity whatsoever. Surely on a site like LJ, that is now 10 years old, something like this should be considered?