Numbered accounts
This is a suggested feature. Please provide your thoughts/input/reactions on this article's talk page.
The idea behind numbered accounts is that an account level would exist that enables users to almost vanish completely from DW, if they choose to do so.
It would be a second-tier Paid Account feature (to discourage their use -- we are trying to build a community here, after all.) The option to create numbered accounts at the signup page would be much less prominent than the other account options, but would still be present on that page.
Users would not be able to convert in and out of numbered accounts at will - if you wanted to create a numbered account, you would have to sign up for one from the start. Signing up would involve paying for a year of Paid+ Account time in advance, and being given an arbitrary numeric username, possibly with a reserved prefix similar to the LiveJournal code's "ext_xxxxx" naming scheme for OpenID accounts.
If the user eventually wanted to join the DW community, they could migrate from a numbered account for a rename token (and away from an all-numeric username.)
If Paid+ Account time runs out while the journal is a numbered account, the user can keep their journal.
The features of this account would be:
- Unable to post to communities or to leave comments in other journals. (This is so as not to reveal the existence of the numbered account to users who aren't trusted by the numbered account.)
- All requests for profile pages, lastn, tag pages, data feeds or etc. associated with the numbered account holder return the same thing as a non-extant journal, unless the logged-in user trying to view the page is on the numbered journal's trusted list.
- Support Requests opened by the numbered account would be listed as being opened by (numbered account), with the actual account information only visible to Support volunteers with privs
- Numbered accounts cannot make public posts.
- Numbered accounts do not appear in sitewide data feeds, do not appear in interest search results, friendsfriends, etc.
The goal of this level is to make it so people who are extremely concerned about their online presence can have an account where they know they are 'safe' from search engine indexing, or from accidentally giving away the existence of their journal. The restrictions above help ensure that the journal remains private other than to those who want to see it.
Technical Implementation
A new statusvis of "N" for numbered would be created, and appropriate checks would have to be added to the code so that statusvis N journals can't do things listed above, and that they are always excluded from data feeds and the like.
