Second Life is full of zombies.
Literal zombies who want to eat our brains but also zombie accounts; residents who have been among us even though they haven’t logged into Second Life for years.
This generally isn’t a big issue although it is slightly itch-inducing for those of us who like order or suffer a bit from OCD.
But after the recent announcement regarding the new costs in SL it seems that they are actually quite a strain on Linden Lab’s resources.
As Grumpity Linden said;
So how about we start clearing inactive accounts?
No no no, calm down, I don’t mean delete everyone who hasn’t been inworld for a few weeks.
I mean we start stripping those accounts that haven’t been inworld for over a year.
And with stripping I mean that the accounts aren’t deleted or cancelled but that they are set to inactive and they lose their land, prims get returned and they’re automatically removed from groups.
And not out of the blue of course!
LL should send them several e-mails weeks in advance asking them to log in or perhaps even just respond to the e-mail or click a re-activate my account link.
That way even those of us who want to return to SL but sadly no longer have a computer that can run it or who are for some reason unable to log in can still quite simply avoid being deactivated for another yea.
How would this improve our Second Life?
Inactive accounts would be removed from all groups and if they own groups, these groups will be disbanded or the group is transferred to the next owner or an admin.
Thus lowering the strain on groups but also letting people know that the group they were a member of was one that it’s owner had abandoned.
I know of a group that has been around for years, has quite a few members in it but its owner left SL and deleted her account.
The group chat is never used, messages are never send.
It’s just taking up resources.
I remove people who haven’t been online for over a year from my group regularly.
Imagine how nice it would be if these people were removed automatically.
The number of group members grid wide would go down dramatically.
The land owned by inactive accounts would be cleared, prims returned and the land put up for sale.
Mainland is littered with little plots owned by people who haven’t used them in years.
I know of several plots on the mainland that belong to people who I know will never return.
One of these plots if full of pets who are all very hungry as they haven’t been fed in years.
Poor neighbours.
Although I don’t think these people should also be removed from marketplace, their sale pages should have it mentioned that the creator/seller of the item is inactive.
Many times I’ve been more than frustrated after buying something only to find out that the person who I need to help me fix something or who I want to give me back my money has left SL.
It would also be nice to see this inactive status on someone’s profile.
Many times I’ve tried to get in touch with someone, waiting for their response only to finally find out they haven’t been online for years by joining a group they are also in.
Anyway, I think it is something we could consider.
Till it becomes a function perhaps considering removing inactive members from your group manyally.
Just in case you don’t know how;
Open your group window, select the ‘Members & Roles’ tab.
Click the ‘members’ button and then the ‘status column till you see your group members ordered by when they were last online.
Select the people you think have been offline too long and then click the ‘eject’ button.
If you click the person at the top of the list and then hold shift, you can scroll down to the last person you want to eject and click that one to select all the people in between at once.
Jo Yardley's Second Life 
There would be one downside to a system automatically purging land and rezzed items. there’s some stuff around SL that are considered precious historical relics of SL, or of other various significant value that where left behind by accounts long abandoned.
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Totally agree. I known historical monument on Sansara recently disappeared, which dated back to the early days of SL (2006?). Imagine the outcry if The Great Wall or The Temple Of Moth suddenly disappeared?…
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A personal experience: It was before I found Second Life, maybe a little before you did, but I was in a car crash, and cut off from Internet access for about seven weeks.
That wouldn’t trigger your suggested “mark inactive”, but the process, from first warning to action, needs to allow plenty of time for a response.
It was an unusually long event for me, but not the only time I’ve been cut off by medical events.
And, at the other end of the scale, I know of very active groups containing accounts that haven’t logged in for ten years. The internet, in general, does seem to have this fixation on total user counts. Going by quantity, not quality, is dangerous. I have seen some pretty vile people who seem to survive on social media because they provoke reactions. Unique logins in the last month is still a tricky number, but it isn’t as outright silly as counting those 10-year-inactive accounts to make big numbers. Are advertisers really that stupid?
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I agree in principle with your suggestion, but think the specifics are heavyhanded.
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grrrrr
to continue:
re. land- remember, one way or another they are PAYING for that land, used or not, LL is not about to stop billing them.
re. groups- all that is really required is to put them on inactive status, say after a year and stop group services. They would still be members unless the group manager removes them but they would receive no notices, group IMs, etc.
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Some good ideas Jo.
However like Shug says, LL loves that repetitive billing for land for as long as the credit card lasts – so they aren’t going to stop that.
And humbly, may i suggest that Marketplace accounts should be closed for inactivity. I point to your own experiences ‘many times frustrated’ by broken or missing content purchases with no Merchant support. That frustration has happened to most Marketplace buyers, and only hurts the SL user experience. Feeling “ripped off” is not a positive emotion and does not help the Marketplace grow/thrive.
On the good side, LL have been working already to delete some of the oldest inactive Marketplace listings.
TANd btw, Big Thanks to you for your constant stream of useful articles 😀
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In a way then this system would also protect the users who have left and who may even have died from their credit card debt going up and up and perhaps even ending up as something their relatives have to deal with.
I don’t think inactive MP accounts should be closed for the simple reason that I sometimes still buy very very old things.
And sometimes I need a redelivery of something made by someone who left SL ages ago.
But their inactive status should be mentioned on their sales pages.
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I just give a simple NO WAY
If he has land and prims out, why you want to return them? They would if they are not payed so no way to do that and the users dont take ressources because they dont login and i bet 99,9% of the inventory are items more then just this person has, so no more problems because the items are not doubled.
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Because many of these inactive accounts have littered SL with their stuff.
It is not fun desperately wanting to buy land next to where you live so you can finally expand but the neighbour has died years ago and left a small army of lag educing and noise emitting pets behind.
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Yes that can happen but thats live you need to find a spot where you want to live
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Target free accounts that have been in-active for over a year – LL should be deleting these automatically, other on-line businesses do it, for security reasons if nothing else.
As for groups, the emphasis really is on the Admin staff to weed out inactive members, and for LL to change the rules so that if the Admin/Group Founder leaves SL the group dies with them, or at least has to be handed on to someone else. BTW not all groups are used to send messages, and are often just used so people can share objects and pool resources/share land. The fact that no messages have been sent, or that the founder left SL a decade ago, doesn’t mean that the group function is inactive…
With regards to Marketplace, yes they should show whether the seller is active or not and how long their goods have been on-sale.
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The problem is however that people with big groups like having big groups, it is something to brag about.
On top of that it is also a pesky job and some group owners don’t know how to delete members in large numbers.
If a group owner is inactive, the group should be passed on to an admin or oldest member perhaps.
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