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

starking

[sculder.livejournal.com]

I think it would be cool if keeping an athena account was an option open to alumni who donate a certain amount per year, exactly like how you can get technology review for "free" as long as you donate so much per year. It doesn't even need to be terribly cheap, since the primary thing is you are donating money somewhere you would like it to go.