Of possible impact

[anenko]

LJ is planning to delete inactive accounts (personal journals and communities which haven't been signed into for 24 months).

To quote:

Purging inactive accounts: One of the benefits of the work we've done to purge suspended accounts is that we will now be able to purge inactive journals and communities too--something you've been requesting for years! A journal is defined as inactive if it has not been logged into for 24 consecutive months. A community is defined as inactive if has not been updated for 24 consecutive months. Once an account is eligible to be purged for inactivity, the owner will be sent an email to alert them of the inactive status. The owner will then have two weeks to log into the journal or post to their community to prevent it from being deleted. If the owner does not log in or post, the account will be deleted and treated like any other deleted account (the owner will have 30 days to log in and undelete the account to prevent it from being purged).

I know this is definitely going to have an impact on some of the pages I've edited. Thoughts on how to deal with soon to be vanished references?

Comments

[morgandawn]

You can see if the page is archived on the WayBack Machine (some journals and communities are there). You can also quote more in depth rather than relying on a simple cite.

From there, it gets tricky. The Geocities Archive project took snapshots of single webpages. We had a discussion a few weeks back about WebCite (an academic citation method) here on Fanlore but didn't reach a consensus.

My thinking is for you to leave the site link as is, pull as much as you can reasonably justify into the text and take a screencap for later use/reference in case you need to go back and verify or adjust.

I found this discussion helpful:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Citing_sources#What_to_do_when_a_reference_link_.22goes_dead.22

PS. If the cite relies on a visual reference/link, then I'd follow Fanlore's existing fair use policy on images and include a thumbnail.

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

Doesn't this go directly against something they officially said before? I remember someone saying somewhere along the line that they would never delete any account that had even one post in it, just in case the person had died. (Yes, there's also the option for someone to contact the official LJ people and say, "Make it a memorial account" but that doesn't always happen.)

[ratcreature]

Yeah, they said they would never do this, but then they said they would never have ads too. Also I don't think gafiated counts as "dead" yet.