Sorry everyone. I get snippy with Lorelle for ordering people about on the .com forums when she’s been here, like, five minutes. You’d have thought she’d be too busy single-handedly running the Codex to bother with anything else, but evidently I was wrong.

When Matt makes her a moderator, I will put up and shut up. I will cut-n-paste her approved answers and point as many newbies to lorelle.wordpress.com and the codex as she desires. (Though, personally, I think sending .com users to the codex is likely to seriously confuse them, seeing as how it documents a bunch of stuff they can’t do.) Admittedly it is more likely that I will get bored of being her minion and leave in a huff, but we shall see.

Until then, she’s a rather less active support volunteer than three or four of us, and if I hadn’t called her on it somebody else would have.

This was going to be a reply here but it kind of spiralled out of control. So…

Expect username suspension to be a major source of user irritation as the namespace fills up. People wanting their deleted usernames back. People wanting someone else’s deleted username and failing to see why they can’t have it. A lot of spur-of-the-moment deletion goes on with any service that offers free accounts and encourages people to write about their personal lives. Ask livejournal. In fact, ask any free hosted blogging system.

Livejournal, of course, is on a far bigger scale than this place, sees a lot more posting and a lot more account deletion. (I don’t think, by the way, that you can count on keeping the schoolgirls out forever. They like shiny new things as much as everyone else, and are undeterred by rubbishy template systems.) Their 30-day grace period before final deletion is mainly for the sake of their servers, but handily also serves as… well, a 30-day grace period. Because sometimes people do stupid things that they regret.

In the lofty world of wordpress.org this maybe didn’t happen so much. Or if it did, you could just reload from a backup. WordPress.com is a land without backup. Here, deletion is forever. My guess is that we’re too used to having Recycle Bins on our desktop to nod quietly and accept that.

My subsidiary point is this. Running a free hosted blogging system is a whole different ballgame to coding one for the use for other people. You thought the wordpress community were unreasonable in the level of accountability they demanded? You ain’t seen nothing, compared to the personal stake people are going to feel they have when their beloved blog is actually on your server. Or when a wordpress.com blogger behaves unacceptably towards them. Or when we start seeing the splogs. Expect even more stupid forum questions, now the dot commers have a place they’re allowed to ask them.

If you want a community, somebody’s going to have to manage it. Is that going to leave time for coding?