Goodness...

[mousme]

Just wandered by a journal of someone I know and was told that not only was it deleted, it had also been *purged.*

Didn't know one could do that. Seems a wee bit drastic for a silly old LiveJournal, but hey. How the hell do you purge a LiveJournal anyway? Here I am having visions of some IT guy sticking his finger down the gullet of an unsuspecting server.

Eww. I just squicked myself. Going to go put that behind a cut tag because it's gross and really inappropriate. I should prolly delete it, all things considered, but I know y'all are voyeurs anyway so I'm leaving it there for the time being :P

I'll be home soonish. Stopped off at the Parental Units for a bit, will be returning for some New Year's revelry tonight briefly, then heading over to Prospero's Daughter's place for some proper, if quiet revelry afterwards.

Yay!

Comments

[vureoelt.livejournal.com]

Servers are machines. Nice clean metal and plastic. A purge would probably be more visually closer to passing a magnet over a floppy. ;)

Have a happy New Year's. ;)

[kimberly-a.livejournal.com]

Here's how I understand it.

Usually, when you see a message that a journal has been deleted, the journal has actually only been marked for deletion. You might say it's been put into the little "Delete These Journals Someday" trashcan. But no one has actually thrown out the trash yet. If the journal owner changes their mind, LJ might actually let them have the journal back, because none of the information is actually gone yet.

When a journal has been "purged", the journal is no longer simply marked for deletion ... it has actually been deleted from the system. All of its contents are permanently gone and cannot be retrieved.

[abiku.livejournal.com]

While that's an accurate description, it should probably be noted that the actual purging of the journal is done by the system (or sysadmins), rather than the end-user; mere mortals cannot actually ensure their journals are purged.

[soccer-mom56.livejournal.com]

Eww. I just squicked myself. Going to go put that behind a cut tag because it's gross and really inappropriate. I should prolly delete it, all things considered, but I know y'all are voyeurs anyway so I'm leaving it there for the time being :P

Huh? Squicked? What is gross and inappropriate?? I feel as if I have missed something (and I don't like that feeling).

[djs-specs.livejournal.com]

Dumb question, but does it say anywhere in the FAQ how long it is before a journal is purged? Just curious is all :)

[abiku.livejournal.com]

I don't believe it does. It does, however, say that the journal will be purged within 30 days when you visit a deleted journal, so I think that would be as good a guess as to "when it'll happen" as any.

Historically, they haven't actually been purging deleted journals, but they mentioned in a semi-recent news post that they were going to start doing it again sometime soon. I guess that sometime is now. It only applies to deleted journals, though -- they won't be purging inactive ones, as far as I know. (They're pretty sensitive about that kind of thing, because of journals of people who've died existing as memorials, or artistic endeavors that were meant to have a limited activity period, but a long life, etc.)

I'm no expert on this, though, so I could be misinformed about some of it. :)