No rename token for purged communities

[tenkuu]

Title:
No rename token for purged communities

Area:
communities, rename tokens

Summary:
A purged username that someone wants to use as a community should not require a rename token.

Description:
Communities shouldn't need rename tokens because they're not a newly created username like someone would have for their own personal journal. Once purged, if a username can be used as a community, it should be as easy to claim it as for any newly created community. After all, purged should mean that it no longer has any association with its previous owner, and in this way it's like any regular unclaimed username.

Poll #2674 No rename token for purged communities

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 47

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
6 (12.8%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.1%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
32 (68.1%)

(I have no opinion)
8 (17.0%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[katieastrophe]

I may not be entirely or even slightly right (so any staff who know better than me, please feel free to correct) but my knowledge of how purging/selling new usernames is this:

* Person buys rename token for specific username which has been purged
* DW staff see rename token and manually change the purged username to something else non descript so that the usernames of comments change
* DW staff assign purged username to person who bought

This process is the same, irrespective of how the purged username was once used, or how it is henceforth going to be used.

i.e. it requires person-power to do some work and therefore, you have to pay for that.

[tenkuu]

But if it's so rarely done, then it isn't all that much work after all.

[denise]

At this point, as far as I can tell, your suggestion (and all of the subsequent comments about it) boil down to "I want to do something without paying for it, so I will suggest that nobody should have to pay for it."

You've made your case for your suggestion; let it go and let it be considered. Arguing with every commenter does nothing to change whether or not your suggestion will be accepted.

[tenkuu]

If this were any other issue, ie an issue not having to do with any kind of payment, you would not be saying such a thing. I think even you are aware that your comment is not at all fair, given this. As a few people pointed out, someone asking to use a purged account username happens rarely, so that is all the more reason not to charge for the rare times when it happens. If this became more commonplace, then there would definitely be more reason to charge for it.

I'm not arguing with anyone. If they ask me a question or dispute something I say, I reply to it. Everyone does the same.

[katieastrophe]

If Dreamwidth said they would do it for free, do you really think it would be rarely done then? People wouldn't go "hey, we're bored of this name, let's change it to $purgedname, just because we can!"?

I'm not convinced.

[tenkuu]

Maybe you're right. Actually, that thought hadn't occurred to me. As far as I know, Dreamwidth is not that well known yet, so when people said that it was rarely done, I thought it was simply for that reason.

[azurelunatic]

The current biggest factor in the way of renaming on Dreamwidth is currently the fact that the user-accessible interface to perform a rename does not exist yet. Right now all renames are done manually by staff, and I believe that to keep the volume of renames manageable, they are mostly doing this in case of typo on account creation.

I have no reason to believe that renaming would be a less popular feature on Dreamwidth than it is on LiveJournal.

I hope, when renames are implemented properly, that staff will release statistics on it (how many total and separately by personal journal and community, how many as a percentage of that type of user, maximum number of renames by one journal (or a curve of number of renames per journal, that would be even better), length of journal ownership and what point in the journal ownership the rename(s) happen, and probably more.

[tenkuu]

If a computer would be doing the renaming, one would think there'd be less chances of typos that can be caused by human error.

Is it even all that popular on LJ?

Yes, that's a good idea. So that one user cannot be changing his username everytime a whimsy strikes.

[azurelunatic]

Perhaps I phrased myself poorly. The "in case of typo" renames are not in case the staff has made a typo in the renaming process, but in case the user has made a typo when registering their account, particularly as creating a new personal journal for free costs an invite code, and buying paid time to get a new journal means you wouldn't want to be stuck with a typo.

Judging from the number of public support requests on LiveJournal asking for help in how to rename, and the number of people on my friends list who have renamed, I would say that it is reasonably popular. At least one person of my acquaintance is on at least her third rename, if not more.

[tenkuu]

Yes, but unless the user says so, how can you be sure that it's typo and not an intended mistype? Ie, I've seen usernames on LJ that have two words stuck together, and because the two words would be one or two characters too long, the person would take out one of the letters. For instance, "mitarashi dango", a japanese sweet: the person in this case used the nick "mtarashidango".

I know maybe two people who have had a rename, and my list is pretty full.

~jumping in here.

[awesome]

That's the point, the user says so. They message Support and ask for a rename because they had a typo in their username they didn't see before. No one's automatically fixing it. It has to be requested.

And as for the knowing people that use renames, on my lj friends list, literally everyone on my list has used a rename at least once, and a handful of them rename their journals every few months. It's a matter of the crowd you run in. They are very popular with all the people I know. You can't assume it's not popular because it doesn't happen in your circle of contacts.

Re: ~jumping in here.

[tenkuu]

My bad, I misunderstood.

True, but just the same, just because everyone you know has renamed their accounts at least once, doesn't mean it's *that* popular with everyone. :)

Re: ~jumping in here.

[awesome]

But that's the thing, you can't assume either way based on your personal opinion.

That said, I know that anytime they announce a purge, since it's not actually done every thirty days or anything close to that, there are pages worth of people saying they're excited because they've been waiting x amount of time to get a specific name. So by everything I've seen, which I admit is nothing close to hard data, it's still really popular.

Also, as someone pointed out before, if you make it free it makes people so much more likely to do it and to increase the workload to the point where money will be lost. By making people pay for it, automated or by hand, it means that the amount of people is down some and even if it's still a massive amount of people, no money is lost in the process.

And then, honestly, there's also the security issue. If someone hacks into your journal and renames it, then you can't ever get it back because renaming takes out any ownership you ever had. So if renames were free, sadly hacking into journals might be even more common or at the very least, ever getting your journal, and all it's content, back would be nearly impossible since the first thing they'd do would be to rename it. The cost off puts renaming it, maybe even for long enough that they can get their journal back. It's no the reason behind the cost but it's a reason I would always bring up to say no to free renames.

Re: ~jumping in here.

[tenkuu]

I'm not making anymore of an assumption than anyone else, just making an observation that neither of us can know for certain.

Yes, but there are what, millions of LJ users? And you see a few hundred, maybe, commenting about how excited they are? I'm just saying there's no real way to gauge it.

I'm not convinced by the security issue argument. If someone wants to hack your account, they'll do it no matter what. If they want it badly enough and want to keep you from getting it back, they'll even pay for it. And if they're not motivated enough, then they won't hack it and will simply choose their intended username. And the thing is, we already have free usernames, and it seems a bit excessive to charge for a rename. Imagine you have an account for 10 years and after that time you want a name change, a change of pace so to speak. If for instance we were all allowed a single rename within a certain time frame, that wouldn't be too excessive and would require less manpower. Also, what you said about a hacked account and how you can't get it back, that should not be happening. There should be a history of the username that would allow a mod to see what the username was previously called.

[azurelunatic]

That's sort of a mix between how it is now and how it's planned.

On LiveJournal, the flow goes:
Person buys rename token for their journal
Person applies rename token and desired destination username
(If destination username is a purged personal journal) automatic job is kicked off to change comments and community entries to the format of "ex_$whoeve###"
Automatic job assigns new username to the renamed journal, and either redirects or deletes the old username, depending.

It will eventually be automatic on DW; renames aren't being currently sold in the shop because it's not automatic. Right now it's mostly being done in cases of obvious typo on account creation.