Athena Account Deactivations

[dmaze]

Athena account deactivations happened last week. I generally don't shed many tears over this; on some level, it seems right to me that people should eventually leave the MIT community. In turn, this means that I've gotten slightly bitter over people who have managed to keep an online presence somehow. It's certainly easy enough: a private Un*x machine is sufficient to get you access to MIT's internal messaging system, a friend can get you a mailing list that forwards email for you, a student group or MIT employee can even maintain your account. (And also a somewhat hypocritical attitude on my part: if I wasn't staff, my account would be preserved by student group affiliation, and I doubt I'd abandon it.)

This begs the question: why does MIT bother? Is there some actual resource that's being recycled by deactivation and isn't growing faster than new accounts? Political-level implications of trying to be able to claim that only students and staff have accounts?

Comments

[cfox.livejournal.com]

Exchanging money for anything is quite difficult to set up and maintain, from an administrative standpoint. (I'm in the middle of the leased disk space billing, and that's only a dozen customers, all with internal account numbers, and still sucks royally.) Taking money from a credit card is hard.

Support is also a big cost, something that's hard to deny people, and hard to recover costs on. I also get the idea that the stopit and net-security teams are relatively costly, case-for-case, and you don't manage to avoid generating those cases, when you have people in funny account statuses.