Is there a flurry of Lindens closing old or marginal accounts?

I've heard of a lot - dozens - of accounts being closed lately. Alt accounts that aren't much used, maybe people who used invalid email addresses, people who abused the registraton api, I'm not sure just what the situtation is.

Whatever the situation is, if you have old acccounts, unloved alts, etc. that you want to keep it might be good to use them, give them a good email address, pay the ten bucks, or whatever it is that keeps them active. Or at least get the money out of their accounts and and good stuff they have.

Anyone else notice this? Anyone know just what the criteria are?

uhm?????????????????

The last time I cleaned my friends list, I happened to search for someone I hadn't seen in ages and they didn't show up, which seems to usually be a sign of either a suspended or deleted account. Putting everyone I hadn't seen in a while through, 5 or 6 - not all sure now - turned out to be missing.

Maybe one, or even two could have done anything to get banned, but I can't imagine all of them did. I know that premium accounts who don't keep up do routinely get deleted but I don't think all of them were premiums either, so I'm not sure what happened.

The only reasons I know off that get an account deleted is requesting it yourself, lapsing on premium, or getting suspended/banned.

(Edited to add that I know of at least 4 people who haven't logged on since June and their accounts still show up, so inactivity doesn't seem to be much of a factor. Also, in November someone asked on LA what the cause of the sudden rise in the "Other" sink was about and the answer was that a bunch of accounts had been purged and balances cleared)

This is news to me.........I never heard or experienced Premium account being deleted due to not logging in for a period of time. Infact they don`t have to log in to gt their own etc..... Confused.

Well my own viewpoint on this issue is I understood it was a requirement of Lindens TOS to provide both a valid email address and a real life name and contact address.

Okay I am sure some get away with c/o Micky Mouse, Doodle House, NoPlace at [email]micky@noemail.com[/email] etc but to be fair if I was Linden Lab and had access to the data files on this type of account, I would consider deleting them, especially if the account balance was zero.

I currently do not have an alt account but if I did (because there was a good reason) $10 as a once off payment is not an issue with me, and more to the point if you want a second account and are not prepared to cough up $10 (once off basis) it seems to me you should question if you can afford SL in the first place.

Over a period of time I have learned you can sometimes avoid rules and regulations you do not like but usually they have a habit of coming back and kicking you when you least expect it

Just a personal view, I am sure others see the issue in a seperate light

My guess would be a purging of very old accounts that had not logged in over a year, were freebie accounts (SL did offer those on occaison before opening registration) and no verifiable email address was on file. I would bet they sent out an email to such accounts and started deleting the accounts with email bounce-backs.

I don't remember the old TOS, but I seem think that if you paid the one time $9.95 for a basic account, that was "for life." But there may have been a disclaimer that your account could be deleted for non-use. What it also could be is back when there used to be the free 30-day trial accounts, LL may not have deleted those accounts when the trial period was up and the person hadn't decide to join SL, preferring to inflate their account numbers.

I would also guess that there is some pressure now to make the account statistics meet with reality.

Please point me to that in tos? um.......never read that

At some point in the opening up of the registration process there was a period in which people started making tons of acounts just to get silly names to use in the forums, one example is when the last name "Replacement" became available lots of people made accounts with their main av's first name and the last name Replacement just to make a silly post or two in the forums. I suspect most such frivolous accounts didn't pay a second account fee and were used inworld very little if at all. This is one type of account I think they might be clamping down on.

I might just have happened to hear of bunch of account closings that are actually taking place all the time but no one mentions them.

I would hope they are finally getting around to cleaning house. Dormant accounts are a waste of resources and as SL grows, they need to keep the house clean. Most online services purge unused accounts after a time. With 2 million accounts, they really need to get rid of the chaff.

What I said was that it may have been in an older version of the TOS, which none of us probaby has access to unless someone decided to save those and archive them somewhere as they have changed over the years. If someone created an account under an older version of the TOS which spells out that the account can be deleted for non-use and they stopped logging in before a new TOS was instituted, they are still under the TOS that they last agreed to and the account can be deleted. Again, this is all just speculation we are engaging in here, none of us actually knows what is going on and what the criteria for account deletion might be.

There was someone ELSE who made replacements of people. I, for instance, did not make Cocoanut Replacement; someone else did. You'll notice that a lot of the Replacements are like that.

I doubt that SL would be removing anyone who is legitimately anything, ever. Not someone who simply hasn't logged on in a while, for instance. Free accounts and basics can also accumulate money in their accounts, and goods, and I can't imagine LL just going in and wiping them out for not logging on.

I was just looking at my friends list this morning, in fact, and I check it out on a regular basis to see if some people have been removed who are still showing up there.

My experience is that NONE of my old friends who were on here as free accounts and just didn't want to play anymore have been removed. A couple who were likely breaking TOS were removed. And there have been a couple removed where I imagine they asked to be, or failed to pay their fees.

My guess would be that if they are removing anyone (outside of those who fail to pay their fees, or who ask to be ), it would be those who gave bogus email addresses on sign-up, and I really don't think LL would even bother to remove them, as it takes some work and is not in their best interest to remove anyone from their numbers.

If they are removing those, then good.

coco

I should be been more specific, sorry (seems I missed a necessary comma in that sentence too ). I meant premium accounts who fall behind on a payment seem to get suspended for 90 days before they're deleted if no payment is made in that time.

it is also possible they are deleting accounts of people who never reset thier passwords after the security breach. Makes sense after all this time to assume many either could not reset for whatever reason or chose not to.

HEHEHEH i am always missing commas, period etc!............hehhe no biggy!
That does make sence people that fail to make thie monthly or yearly payment. Sound more like what those money tree farms do signup, remove the payment information.. account gets canceled Nice trick a? Doesnt talk a PH.D mind to figure this one out! I wish LLabs would just stop this BS those cheap greedy kids are doing.........
Good Day to you