Purging Communities

[tapho]

Title
Purging Communities

Short, concise description of the idea
I would like communities that are no longer in use to be purged.

Full description of the ideaI have found communities that only have one post or have many posts, but are no longer use and haven't been in use for years. I'd like these communities to be purged so that the usernames can

Comments

[boredinsomniac]

Previously suggested, sort of, in May 2008:http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/855613.html

-1

[just_chiara]

Communites with no entries whatsoever, maybe. The maintainer(s) would have to be notified and given enough time to stop the purging, though. And the current members should be given a chance to take over moderation if the current maintainer(s) has/have deleted their account(s).

Communities with at least one entry, no. Old entries can still be useful to members (or, if public, to anyone). What about communities created for a specific challenge, or for birthday wishes, or for a now 'old' movie? They may not have any new entries ever again, but the entries that are there should not be deleted.

# When looking for a specific community that you want to belong to, you no longer stumble upon inactive community after inactive community.
That should be solved by improving the search page, not by purging communities.

Re: -1

[trixieleitz]

That should be solved by improving the search page, not by purging communities.

Yes.

Old communities that are no longer being updated can still contain valuable entries, so, if this suggestion is implemented, the parameters for deletion will need to be carefully thought out.

Re: -1

[lassarina]

This.

Re: -1

[tapho]

This specific community has one entry that just says "test test test." As if they were testing out how communities worked and just chose a random username and then opened up an actual new community.

And they then posted nothing further. It was posted in 2004. I see no reason that this community should be not be purged.

[licon]

+1 if it's only for communities that have *never* been active and have zero posts.

I'd vote for case-by-case decisions for communities with only one introductory post, and even then I'd probably lean towards "only if someone wants the username".

[tapho]

See my comments above. And I agree with the case-by-case decision.

[charliemc]

I agree with this. I'm frustrated by communities that have never done ANYTHING -- post entries or comment to other journals/communities. Especially when they have names that others clearly DO want. (Been there, by the way...)

[kayt_arminta]

-1 I have a writing community I haven't written in in a year.... so it should be purged because I have writers block? Absolutely -1 If there is a comm name you want and you just can't have, suck it up buttercup, it's happened to a lot of us and what do we do? Think more uniquely and come up with a different name. Communities should not be deleted because you're too lazy to come up with another name.

[tapho]

Again, I've responded to previous concerns like this in other comments about the types of communities that should be purged

[prisoner1]

Your writers block has nothing to do with purging a community. Obviously, you are somewhat active on LJ because you posted here, so if you were sent a notification then you could respond to the "purge notification". LJ could simply set a 6 month time limit to respond, and they could send multiple notifications during the 6 months to try and reach you.

As far as content that should be kept, even if LJ deleted your writing - wouldn't you have a copy of important things on your own hard-drive??

Communities that have old posts and nothing recent like within a year or two could still be thriving - in other words, people are still logging on and reading the entries.

And BTW, names are important. Laziness has nothing to do with not wanting to choose another name. In fact, laziness would be not caring and settling for just any name. You say "it's happened to a lot of us..." - then YOU SHOULD WANT THE PURGE! That's the point.

And what's with the "suck it up buttercup"? Your writers block is definitely showing.

[kayt_arminta]

Wow, fine, my friend has writer's block, not me, and can't write in her writing comm. Is that better? You're just attacking the comment, and not paying attention to the content. This is over. And wow, under your rules, shouldn't your own journal be deleted and purged? I see no friends, no nothing. Maybe you're just here to stir up shit, I don't know. I just vote negatively to your suggestion and that's it. I will no longer respond to your petty useless arguments.

[lied_ohne_worte]

I have to disagree with purging communities that have content. For example, I maintain a community that contains lots of posts that are basically graphics resources converted from Photoshop, so they are usable in the open source graphics program GIMP - people could request things, or individual resource creators could ask to have their things converted, and people could share them in the comm without everyone needing to convert for themselves

[tapho]

I've already responded to these concerns in the above comments.

[tapho]

I'm just gonna repost my comment that I stated below:

But then wouldn't those still be shown as active to the LJ staff? They can track how many visits journals and communities are getting. So even if there is no posting going on, then LJ staffers should be able to see "oh okay, they're still getting tons of hits and this is being used a reference site" and the community would stay open.

It would take a lot of work on behalf of the LJ staff, but this is a suggestion community and people are going to suggest things that are going to take time and effort for the LJ staff to fix if they so choose to take up that task.

Thank you for your input. :)

[prisoner1]

I fear case-by-case decisions would really be difficult. You don't always know what the content in a comm means and who reads it, and it would be really hard to explain to people why their comm was deleted, but other comms were not.

If people are reading the content, then the community is not inactive - LJ doesn't have to read the content, it just has to look at the traffic. Look at what your own post says - you arent updating, but other people still are and still logging on to read. And again, you could respond to LJ deletion notifications to keep the community open. Right? And you would only receive that notification IF you had no posts and readers for 1-2 years.