Moderator Post

[stormy]

UPDATED! You must be releasing at least 100 accounts at this time to contact Dreamwidth Staff. Thank you! - August 09, 2012.

First and foremost, I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed to the community. Since there is no deleted and purged username list on Dreamwidth at current, I'm glad to see users picking up some unwanted names.

Secondly, if you are a user who has a large number of accounts ( at least 100 accounts, please for denise's sanity) that you are not using and want to relinquish those accounts in one go without having to manually delete them all and without facing any possible consequences for name sitting, denise has given you an alternative to do so without possible repercussions for name sitting!

Simply follow the steps below:

1. Head to Support, open a request in the Account Payments category.
   
2. Use the email address the accounts are registered to.
   
3. Leave a list of account names that can be freed up.
   
4. Send! You're saving yourself and others rename hassle and Dreamwidth Points. You're awesome.
   
5. If you'd like to still leave the list here for others to find, feel free. I've created a new tag, marked unregistered for you to put these names under.
   
   It's a manual process right now, but this will allow these accounts to bypass the deletion. purged username, and rename token periods. Please feel free to link this entry and pass this on to your circle.

Comments

[stormy]

Good afternoon Denise,

If any updates need to be made to http://deleted.dreamwidth.org/7221.html for your sanity, just let me know. I'm starting to hear that the option is getting attention, and I'm really glad to hear about it. (I'll update it to specify at least ten accounts.)

Also, had a question/thought about the manual process: If you're manually going in to un-register or rename the list of names and it's not going through the deletion round - will those who have the name notifications set up for when a name purges be notified (probably not is my guess). I figured 'no', since it's not going through the purge process, is that right? I couldn't think of any way to list those names being freed up other than dumb luck when someone tries them out at a later date.

[denise]

No, sadly there's no way to send out a notification -- the process basically uses one-half of the rename process (by accessing the backend methods directly through a command-line script), not the user purge methods. It's not purging the account -- the account itself still exists -- it's just renaming "username" to a "ex_username_123" type name. So, the account itself doesn't get deleted or purged, it just gets renamed.

[stormy]

That's what I was guessing. Dumb luck then. I think in that case, the message center might list an ex_username123 instead when the username is renamed? I remember seeing that before.

[denise]

That only works if the account is set to renamed-and-forwarding -- I'm pretty sure the backend script doesn't do that :(

[stormy]

I see. Thank you for the clarifications! They are extremely helpful.