How to delete an account?

[karlklondike]

I want to delete my other account, because I can't change the original username. How do I go about doing this?

[Rhonda Huntress]

Send anything transferable to your new avatar and just walk away.  If it is over something as trivial as a bad name there is no reason at all to delete it and I can give you several good reasons to keep an alt.

 

• Pose adjusting
• Secondary owner of your group
• Photo dummy (either taking the picture or as the subject)
• Market Place gacha trader.

You can delete the account from your dashboard.  Click the Second Life logo at the top of this page to go to your dashboard.  Click the down arrow next to Account and the click Delete Account at the bottom of that menu.

It is not really deleted, it is just no longer protected and will cost 10 bucks to reactivate it if you ever decide you want it back.

So really.  Just don't log in.  It costs you nothing and even when it is deleted it will not even free up that name for reuse.

[ChristianNightstalkerJr]

I clicked on the Delete account and it still allows me to log into it without reactiving it. Why doesn't Linden Labs just delete it rather than just keeping it unactive?

[Rhonda Huntress]

If you had a premium account it will remain active until the paid time is up. If you had a basic account, you can still log in while the account is waiting to be deleted on the next clean up cycle.

 

As far as why goes, you would need to ask the people that made that decision Is it financial, altruistic or just a hold over from before free accounts. I don't know.

[Bree Giffen]

My totally uninformed guess as to why accounts are disabled and not deleted is that LL has a policy of not transferring accounts between real life people. Deleting an account implies that it can be used by a new person and we all know that will not happen. LL doesnt need to have a huge amount of deleted accounts that cant be used. People change their minds all the time and may want their old account back. There is less drama in reactivating an account.

[Perrie Juran]

Maybe a really old Oldbie can verify this.  I never saw documentation but had a couple of Oldbies tell me that the reason accounts are not deleted was because of the way creations are associated in the servers with their creators.  In the very early days of SL they discovered that deleting the accounts caused problems downstream with copies of the items that the creator had passed out.

But then I've also heard rumours on a couple of occasions that LL did some purging of old dead accounts.  These probably had nothing associated with them.

[Teagan Tobias]

It could be part of a numbers game, it looks better to see that 45 million people have accounts in SL than to see a much smaller number.

As of 2016-04-22 01:55:01 there are 45771015 total residents.

I have worked around some databases that don't like things to be deleted, so there may be that kind of a problem. Only LL can tell you for sure.

[Bobbie Faulds]

The reason they don't delete accounts is because of player-created content. When you create something, that's stored on the server. When you give that out or sell it, what is actually happening is your avi links to the original content. If that original content is deleted, the links are broken. It's easier to do that than have thousands of copies of the same computer info running around on the servers. That's how they are able to delete DMCA'd content. They replace the stolen with a placeholder.

If you "delete" an account, then want it back, most, if not all, of your original inventory will still be there. 

[karlklondike]

Thanks for answering. I have all the info I need now.