Nick expiry lengthening blog

Blogpost for lengthening our nickname expiry.

Co-authored-by: Ryan Schmidt <skizzerz@skizzerz.net>
Co-authored-by: Svante Bengtson <svante@swantzter.se>

Author: 3 people

content/_posts/2021-09-30-lengthening-nick-expiry.md

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+---
+title: Lengthening Nickname Expiry
+author: kline
+---
+
+Hello Libera Chat users,
+
+We intend to extend the routine nickname expiry policy from 10 to 20 weeks,
+doubling the time a nick must be unused to consider expired. Please read on
+below to find out more about what this means and why we're doing it.
+
+One of the unusual things about IRC is that you can group multiple nicks to
+your account identity - essentially giving you what seems like multiple
+usernames.
+
+This is cool, but in order to prevent nicks becoming unusable where an account
+has grouped them, but never uses them, we also have an expiration policy:
+currently that policy states that any nick unused for 10 weeks can be removed
+from your account, on request for re-use, at staff discretion.
+
+This is a policy that's been extant for many years, inherited from our
+previous incarnation, and it's served us well. After giving it much thought,
+however, we've decided that we believe that 10 weeks is too short a period of
+time. It's not been uncommon for people to take 2-3 months away from IRC and
+find that their account has been dropped.
+
+With this in mind we have considered a number of options, but decided that
+simple is best, a straight doubling of the time-span. This also means that
+setting your account into VACATION mode also doubles, reaching 60 weeks - a
+bit over a year.
+
+We intend to bring this policy into effect in 10 weeks time, so as to avoid
+changing the status of any nicks until a full expiry period has elapsed under
+the current policy. You can see the exact working of the policy change [at the
+pull request here][1].
+
+Please note that as with the current policy, expired nicks are *not*
+automatically dropped. Expired nicks are only dropped on request, and subject
+to staff discretion. Please do not be concerned about your account or nicks -
+we are only extending the current policy to make it even less likely that they
+are expired. We also plan to re-evaluate how this policy has gone in a while,
+to see whether 20 weeks is working for us all.
+
+As always, we're available on `/stats p` and in `#libera` to answer any
+questions you have about this policy.
+
+[1]: https://github.com/Libera-Chat/libera-chat.github.io/pull/173