What's the half-life on user names?

Little play on words, but my question is when do user names get recycled, if ever? There's a name I would really have liked to had, but it's taken by an account that hasn't logged on in almost six months and was obviously a new account / alt that never made it.. no payment info, groups, anything.

Last names are only available until I think 500 people choose that name, and they are never made available again. Occasionally you'll see different spellings or variants of older last names available, but the exact same surname has not, to my knowledge, ever been repeated.

Also, user accounts are never automatically deleted by Linden Lab. They will only be deleted if the person who created the account explicitly deletes it from the web site (and even then the account sort of lies dormant for 2 months in case the user changes her mind and wants to re-instate).

But even if it was an unpopular last name and the person whose name you want did delete their account, I have a suspicion that you'd never be able to use the name again anyway, because such an ability could be exploited for identity fraud purposes. I don't know the final answer on that one though.

I was trying to get a particular name for an alternate account. I had a problem when I got to the part of the application which asked me to type in the letters from the picture. I failed three times, because I just got three pictures where one letter was completely unintelligible and I didn't make the right guess. I wrote to Linden Labs about the problem, and never got a response, and the name remains unavailable. So I'm assuming the name is gone forever, and the account never even got finalized.

Linden Lab has a Last Name FAQ which states
LL intends to make last names "collectible'. The policy of never repeating last names, i.e., retiring last names forever, is consistent with this intent.

Over SL history, most last names have less than 500 agents under them... but that is an old paradigm. LL has not rotated the current list of 315 available names since late January 2007. Therefore, there are at least 2,000 agents for every one of those 315 last names.

(warning: off topic) Read on for some random last name trivia:
The rarest last name that is currently available is "Hultcrantz" with a bit over 2000 agents. The most common last name that is still available for new users is "Allen" which is the most common last name in SL history: nearly 100,000 SL agents have "Allen" for a last name. I would call this the last name MOST in need of immediate retirement.

Try again later. I remember reading in another thread that it takes some minutes or hours for the name to reset, but its not locked up forever.

That's crazy! Why would they just stop rotating the surnames in January... makes no sense.

Also- how do you find such interesting trivia?

-Atashi

A similar thing happened to a friend who was undecided on a new name and ran several ones through the checker to see if they were taken. When she finally went back to one that had been available just seconds before, it was marked as taken. Someone else could have swooped it while she checked a couple more, but I assumed it was because SL had already reserved it for her when she initially requested it.

To figure out when they last rotated the names, I used people search. I typed in "Mar Allen" and looked for the oldest agent in the first one hundred results. Mark, Marc, Marcus, etc. are some of the most common first names in SL, so I made an assumption that they were gobbled up quickly as soon as the new round of last names became available. The oldest agent in this list was born on 1/31. I did the same thing for Aaybe, Amat, Anatine,... Decosta, Decuir,... Martynov, Masala,... Zenovka. After I checked over 100 of the 315 names, and the oldest agent for each one was born between 1/21 and 2/2/2007, I figured it was safe to assume that ALL of the current last names began around that time.

To get the counts of how many agents have each last name, again I used people search.

I did check one week later, and the name was still unavailable (but also not in use). I haven't checked since, maybe I will.

Of course, one has to wonder how many of those names are still in use: I mean, there's still lotsa McCann's out there in People Search, but the last time I met a McCann was on Orientation Island.

I kinda wish some of the old names were available, I know people who missed their RL last name by days (or possibly hours, in one case). A shame dat the only way they can get 'em is to pay a whole lotta extra money, when SL allows dat.

Mari