A couple of days ago, I noticed a Photobucket placeholder image that was a little different than the one we’ve all seen that appears whenever an item stored on Photobucket has been moved or deleted. This one said “Account inactive” in red text, followed by “[username]’s account has been inactive for 90 days.” It has been close to 90 days since I logged in to my own Photobucket account, so I went to check in on my own files.

I found this in the Photobucket FAQ:

Why were my linked images deactivated?

If you do not log into your Free account within a 90-day period (three months), Photobucket deactivates your linked images on other websites. These linked images will be reactivated when you log into your account.

Important! If you do not log into your account within a 365-day period, your account will also be deactivated. If you go Pro, your account and linked images to third-party websites will remain active for the duration of your Pro subscription.

Ooookay. Good to know. I don’t know whether email notifications of the policy change were sent out or not, just that I do not remember getting one. I’m not upset, because everything I have on Photobucket (or Flickr, or YouTube, or Facebook, or… anywhere) also lives on a CD, DVD, thumb drive, the giant-ass external hard drive, and/or the internal hard drive of one or more computers. Hey, I didn’t say I was super organized about my data. But I do back it up somewhere, even if I’m not always 100% sure where. It just makes me wonder how often I should check in on my semi-dormant online places, or whether I should dump some of them completely.

Speaking of dumping online places, back in September, I completely left the VZones virtual worlds where I had been a member for over five years. I spent a fairly large amount of time there when I was a member (in fact, I originally joined to have something fairly time-consuming to occupy idle moments on days when my husband was at the firehouse), but strangely enough, I don’t find myself missing them at all.

I’m not sure whether it’s even worth caring about, because you can delete almost all of your personal information before quitting, but there are sure a lot of places, mostly forums, that do not physically delete your account when you quit. I am guessing they have to keep the member count artificially inflated to keep the advertisers happy. There are no technical reasons to prevent you from deleting an account from the database that I know of. So yeah, your accounts won’t be consecutively numbered any longer, but that doesn’t — or shouldn’t — actively screw up anything.

Just going through my bookmarks, I can see a bunch of places that I don’t visit much any more. I’ll really have to decide whether they should be dumped permanently.

(NaBloPoMo | November ’09: 2 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 247 of 274)