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

[facetofcathy]

See this post and this post linked from the first one for more information about how this is really going to go down.

If this is accurate, and it seems to be, RP journals will only be affected in the owner never made any posts in the journal itself--which may be common, I don't know.

Most of the comments that will be deleted are from suspended accounts and those comments are already invisible even to the journal owner where they were made.

As to what Fanlore should do when editors know content will disappear--a policy on when and how screencaps can be used seems to be in order. I've been a bit leary of the fact that an exception the rule about citing now-locked content via screencaps is buried in the Talk page for Racefai'09 since that decision was made.

[turlough]

It looks like only comments from suspended users will be deleted at all: http://soph.livejournal.com/206549.html?thread=832981#t832981

wiki committee response

[aethel]

I looked up that exception on the talk page and conferred with the other committee members. The decision on the talk page stands, and I've updated the Fanlore:Citation page to reflect this.

Here is the original wiki committee statement:

Wiki Committee response: After discussion, the committee has adopted the position that if something was initially public, then screencaps of that material are fine to include as long as nothing in the screencap otherwise violates policy. The key here is the expectation of privacy at the time the initial post was made/commented on -- if the post was originally open, there was no such expectation, and a retroactive friends-lock/removal doesn't change that. Care should be taken, as always, to present as many points of view on the issue/controversy as possible. Thus, if the screencap no longer represents the current position of the person represented, please take care to note their changed stance as well. - Melina 18:23, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Re: wiki committee response

[facetofcathy]

That's excellent!

I think it's a good thing when the posted policies match the user's viewable reality.