Monthly General Meeting, September 2026
Other questions
Should we adjust account name expiration policy?
This meeting evaluated a proposal to allow account names to expire under the same rules as nicks. Currently, account names only expire if the entire account is unused. This allows an active user of the network to indefinitely deny the use of one nick that they themselves never use.
Outside the meeting, there was strong opposition to this change.
Forcibly changing account names has implications for authentication,
matches against $a list modes, and even bot privileges.
Account name changes are also relatively quiet; no email is generated
when an account is renamed, so an affected user has to guess that
their account still exists. While these implications are somewhat tolerable
for users who have been gone from the network for nearly a third of the year,
they aren’t for users who are still actively using the network,
just under a different nickname.
The author of this proposal was unable to attend the meeting to respond to these objections. Therefore, the meeting agreed to defer a vote on this proposal, but agreed that it cannot be accepted as-is.