There is a practice among many web apps that after a period of inactivity, user accounts get expired, sometimes this means switching them to an inactive status, and sometimes this means flat out deleting their accounts.

We don’t like this practice, it is prohibitive to users returning at all.

Yes, sometimes users go away for a little while, a user could go months between using their account depending on the type of work they do, and we know that forcing them to re-sign up again after months away and starting over would be a huge pain.

I recently ran into this with a site I used to use a lot, and then hadn’t use for nearly a year, at some point, my account had been set to inactive and I couldn’t log back in when I actually had a need to.

After a few emails back and forth to their support department, they ended up having to delete my account entirely so I could sign up again, this had the added side effect of losing the information I had actually logged in to retrieve, and then had to get support to associate my old data with the new account, as it seemed support could do that, but not re-activate an expired account.

This has the result of spending nearly a full day trying to retrieve something that should have otherwise taken ten minutes at the most to retrieve, and helped show why not expiring users is the better move.

If you only log in once a year, you’ll find things as you left them previously, and that is how we like it.