Notifications, Purged Accounts, Stats, TxtLJ, Gulf_Aid_Now
In response to your requests, we wanted to take some time to answer some of your outstanding questions. Buoyed by your encouragement last week, Meme convinced Frank to go white-water rafting down the Russian River for a while (more details below). Frank will be stopping by the local watering hole to unwind and would love to hear all about your most memorable (i.e., dramatic) aquatic adventure, whether it was whooshing down a water slide, parasailing off a cliff, or falling in a mud puddle. Cry him a river, and he'll float you a boat.
Important stuff to know
- Notifications: We've been working hard to resolve notification issues. You may have already noticed an improvement in news notifications. We're reducing announcement notifications by turning off notifications for inactive accounts. This will reduce server loads to ease congested queues. We know many of you are still experiencing delayed or missing notifications, so we want to assure you that repairing our notification system is a top priority.
- Purging suspended accounts: We expect to start purging suspended accounts by August. The hold-up is that we're still modifying and testing scripts to ensure that all posts--including comments and community entries--associated with suspended accounts are properly purged. For more technical details on how these purges will work, please see this post. We'll let you know when these purged usernames become available.
- EDIT: 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 and has only one post (i.e., the welcome post). A community is defined as inactive if has not been updated for 24 consecutive months and has only one entry and no comments. 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). Purging inactive accounts will take place sometime after we've begun purging suspended accounts, probably in late August. Again, you can read technical details about suspended and inactive account purges in this post. We'll be sure to let you know when these purged usernames become available.
- TxtLJ update: We want to give you a heads up that we're researching other mobile messaging options that will allow us to extend this feature to our international users. If you're a paid or permanent user, you can read more about it here.
Thanks to all of you for participating in the first round of polls. This week, we'd like to present the finalists for your voting pleasure. We regret that a couple of entries got lost along the way. We hope you'll resubmit them for inclusion in our next header contest. We'll begin accepting entries next week. We hope you'll help us decide which header will grace the top of LiveJournal by casting your ballots here. Polls close on Monday, July 19th, at 3PM, PDT.
Gulf_Aid_Now charitable vgift
We're delighted to announce that gulf_aid_now has already raised over $3,000 to support clean-up and wildlife protection in the wake of the oil disaster. They've created a charitable vgift, which will help fund environmental recovery efforts. Priced at $0.99, we'll donate all proceeds to the National Wildlife Foundation's Oil Spill Fund (we'll cover the processing fees). We want to thank you, again, for coming together to make a positive social impact.
The adventures of Frank & Meme
Frank and Meme are taking a short vacation up north to reconnect. When they return, they'll be setting up a cozy new abode. Based on your feedback, we'll post brief prompts in the newsletter each week and ask you to submit original fanfic to frankandmeme. We'll be using +1 ratings to choose which entry will continue the narrative (we're thinking, up to 300 words with or without an image). A very short excerpt and link to the winning submission will be published in news under a cut. All participants will receive 500 LJ tokens, while the winning author will be awarded 1,000 LJ tokens. Frank and Meme will still give out vgifts to those who comment on the winning post (at their new address). We look forward to hearing further suggestions at frankandmeme.
For our featured photo, we'll catch you under the cut!
Photo of the week
Congrats to r4m1r3z, who won our 29th LJ_photophile poll! Click here to vote for the next photo of the week. Just a note: We used a combination of comments and +1 ratings to select photos for the poll this week, but we plan to start using +1 ratings only moving forward. Of course, your comments are always welcome.
Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you next week!