dw_news | December Holiday Promotion - Points Bonus on all orders!

December Holiday Promotion - Points Bonus on all orders!

It's that time of year again -- the calendar year is drawing to a close, the end-of-year holidays are nearly upon us, and Dreamwidth would like to say "thank you" to everyone who decides to give their friends (or themselves) a holiday gift of DW paid time.

From now until the end of December, all orders made in the Dreamwidth Shop will receive a 10% points bonus for future use. For instance, if you buy yourself a 12 month paid account (350 points), we'll give you 35 points to spend later when you complete your order.

This is our way of saying "thank you!" to everyone who helps to support Dreamwidth, and helps us to continue being independent, user-supported, and ad-free. Our commitment to remaining free of fiscal pressure from outside interests and 100% devoted to providing our users the best service possible is only possible because of you, and we'd like to thank everyone who supports us.

Happy holidays from Dreamwidth!

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Yeah, but with that, you always get the question of, how long is reasonable? (The example we always used when discussing internally at LJ was the Christine Problem: a beloved volunteer and heavy user of the site who went into the Peace Corps and promptly lost all internet access except for once a year tops due to where she was stationed.) And pretty much every time you bring up "okay, what about this scenario" someone goes "actually, I know somebody who'd get caught by that, and they're definitely still using the account."

So, it's just one giant mess of conflicting desires, and in that case our tendency is to default to the least disruptive to the status quo, assuming that we can't find something that works better for more people than the status quo does. Especially since we have to prioritize what we work on!

In your example however, she was a heavy user of the site and a volunteer. Not at all the same thing as someone who created an account and had no communities/subscription/access/entries/comments/etc.

Since I'm planning on doing PeaceCorps after college (hopefully) I know I could be gone two years and three months or so from the internet. And if I went to China to study Mandarin at some point, I'd probably be incognito for a year because I wouldn't want to be exposing myself to English unnecessarily. But I definitely have evidence of activity here.

I tried to enlist to the Navy a few years ago too (but my mother's an immigrant, which eliminated me from all the jobs I wanted, and then I have depression, so they didn't want me anyway) and even if for some reason I couldn't have accessed the internet 5, 10, 20 years, there are still clear signs that I was an active user at some point before I left on LiveJournal and DreamWidth, whereas most people are only talking about accounts that have no such signs whatsoever.

Though this actually reminds me, is there eventually going to be a 'hiatus' status? Because if I did get into PeaceCorps and couldn't get online for a year or more at a time, I would want to try to make sure my account can't get hijacked here.

We have a bug open for "vacation mode", yeah.

That would be amazing. I don't know if it'd do much for security, but at least if I was gone people on my friends/friends of list would know why.

ok, this may be a really dumb question but aren't permanently inactive accounts and/or accounts with user names being optioned off significant security risks both from malicious individuals or robo-spamming?

A traded or given-away account can never be secured (and that doesn't make a difference if the account was active or inactive at the time of trading), so we very very very much discourage accepting an account from anyone if you didn't create it yourself. (Selling usernames, meanwhile, is a violation of the Terms of Service, as it is an attempt to resell access to the site, which is a ToS violation.) Inactive accounts are spam risks, yes, but active accounts can be too (many people don't delete spam they receive), the default settings on a newly-created account are deliberately chosen to minimize spam risk (with, of course, people free to change them later, but still), and the site-wide antispam team does a lot of work to make sure that spammers are dealt with; there's a certain amount of "herd immunity" provided by having people who do manage their spam comments, because a spammer very, very rarely hits a single account.

Inactive accounts are an attractive nuisance, yes, but we think it's an acceptable tradeoff for not violating the principle of least surprise -- if someone comes back to an account that they registered after a long hiatus, they should be able to find it still there, and it's hard if not impossible to tell the difference between "inactive temporarily due to life circumstances" vs "inactive permanently because the person never intends to come back" -- and many, many people change their minds. (I know of a lot of people who registered a DW account when open beta hit, never used it, waited two years, and then decided that they wanted to start using the account.)

Anyway, we have no current plans to revisit our policy of not revoking someone's registered account just for appearing inactive -- as I think I said up there, every time the topic comes up, somebody points out that they know someone whose actually-being-used account would fit any proposed "inactivity" metric.

thank you for that - it's not an issue i've thought much about before - so this was very informative/helpful/flattery get me anywhere?/ok, carry your school bag?

basically, ta muchly.

You're welcome! After doing this for as long as I have (started volunteering for LJ in 2001, heh) the one thing I've learned is that nothing is ever as simple as it seems at first glance. :)

some crazy fool upped and gifted me already!!! :)))

clearly, therefore, this December - Points Bonus thing was a very good idea from the DW team!
yes, i approve! LOL!

*glee*

Edited 2011-12-05 03:37 (UTC)

I wonder if there is any way to make crowdsourced reporting of spammers for areas with inactive administrators actually workable. Most of the ways that I could think of might be vulnerable to being gamed by an organized group with a grudge.

Hnm. I've never seen a system that wasn't vulnerable to grudgey stuff unless it had massive human oversight, but then again, spamreports do have human oversight to begin with...

We do!

On the one hand, under normal circumstances the journal owner is the only one who can delete comments -- or the comment creator, in case of non-anonymous comments.

On the other hand, when an account is suspended, all of that account's comments go away, without the permission of the journal owner.

On the gripping hand, what the spammers are after is visibility, and screening a comment based on crowdsourced input and human antispam review, and allowing the journal owner to confirm-and-delete, or deny-and-unscreen, sounds like a case of least-possible-harm to me.

I wouldn't want the team to have to do twice the work, so my proposed workflow involves creating some sort of a "verified spam by the antispam team" flag that would be attached to the comment while it was screened and sitting there, so that when it was then deleted-as-spam by the journal owner, it would not wind up back in the queue.

*ponders*

I'm not really sure, to be honest, but when it comes to being inactive a set period of time I mostly would want to let my friends since 2002 know that I'm gone, why, and that I'd be coming back.

If I do get into PeaceCorps eventually, I would imagine the lack of activity would make my account more likely to be targeted in general, and it's something I have thought about. Particularly for LiveJournal, since their time limit is six months for removing the 'primary' email now. It was actually better for security initially because my registration email no longer existed and could have been signed up by anyone. But if I leave over 6 months it leaves me vulnerable for being permanently kicked out of the account, if it were hacked.

Here I'd be more worried about my registration email being hacked, though, since then I'd be unable to regain control of the account.

Edited 2011-12-04 21:48 (UTC)

yeah - this thread has made rush across the net and tie up a few loose ends - or in some cases reactivate the whole damn wardrobe!
thanks - you've helped get my mind a-moving.
and good luck with your ambitions. :)

Yeah, as it stands I try to make sure I have control over the registration email, and I try to have good, frequently changed passwords. But I mostly don't worry about it except the idea of longer-term absences either planned or unplanned.

And thanks :P

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

December Holiday Promotion - Points Bonus on all orders!

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