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

[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.