Reminder for community maintainers who are about to delete their own journals

[lady_angelina]

Title
Reminder for community maintainers who are about to delete their own journals, that they are still maintaining one or more communities

Short, concise description of the idea
On the Account Status page (http://www.livejournal.com/accountstatus.bml) where you delete or undelete your journal, I think it would be nice to have a reminder to community maintainers that they are still currently maintaining at least one community at the time they are deleting their own personal journals.

Full description of the idea
One common problem affecting community maintainership is that of "orphaned" or abandoned communities, which have no active maintainers. Often, this situation is caused by a community's sole maintainer deleting their personal journal without transferring maintainership to someone else. While it is possible that the maintainer will undelete their journal before a month has passed, I have seen a large number of communities whose sole maintainer's journal was purged, and as a result, no one is able to manage the aforementioned communities any longer.

I am surmising that one of the reasons that someone would not ensure that management of their community has been passed to someone else, is because they have simply forgotten that they still maintain it. Yes, the "Work as user" drop-down menu is displayed on the Account Status page and should probably serve as a reminder itself, but that is easily overlooked. So I was thinking that perhaps a more direct reminder to anyone who maintains at least one community could be given in the form of an additional message on the Account Status page, saying that they still maintain at least one community.

This could be done in a number of ways, which I will detail under the "Suggestions for Implementation" section. Also, note that this would merely involve additional text or links on the same page, not something that would hinder or prevent a user from deleting their journal. I briefly thought about having an additional "splash" page to display this information to get the user's attention, but that would more likely be as unnecessary as it would be annoying.
An ordered list of benefits

• Fewer abandoned or "orphaned" communities due to sole maintainers deleting their own personal journals.
• Fewer related Support or Abuse requests from former maintainers with new journals, or other community members.
• In the case of communities that the user has decided to delete as a result of this idea, more usernames that will eventually be available for renaming to, after the communities in question have been purged.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• As usual, the time and trouble required to code and implement this idea.
• Extra database queries and possible resultant site slow-down, depending upon whether a simple check for maintainership is made or if extra checks are made for sole maintainership of at least one community.
• Effectiveness is uncertain, as the users may choose to ignore or disregard the reminder anyway.
• Potential for additional confusion or annoyance on the Account Status page from additional links and/or text to read.
• This would not be effective for communities whose sole maintainers are already deleted and purged.

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

Here are several ideas I have for possible implementation, and they can be combined in a number of ways (ie., one or more of the below ideas can be mixed and matched, but not all of them would have to be used):

• A check would need to be made for community maintainership. The simplest way would probably be to use whatever check is performed in order to display the "Work as user" drop-down box on certain pages. The downside of that would be that perhaps the user is not the sole maintainer of any of the communities they maintain. So an alternative would be to do additional checking for the number of maintainers of the communities in question, and then display the reminder only if the user is the sole maintainer of at least one community. However, this might be a PITA to code and might be more trouble than it's worth.
• An extra line of text that says, "You are still currently maintaining one or more communities. Before you delete your journal, you may wish to ensure that these communities are being maintained by someone else. Please note that once the journal of a community's sole maintainer has been purged, it will not be possible for anyone to gain maintainership of the community." (Except better-worded, of course. ;) )
• (Optional) A link to FAQ 100 (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=100&view=full) or FAQ 93 (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=93&view=full).
• (Optional) A link to the user's Community Management page (http://www.livejournal.com/community/manage.bml), for the user's convenience.