Change in nick expiry times

Up to now, the expiry time of nicks has been 60 days. As you know, Services compress timespans into years, weeks, and days. 60 days are 8 weeks and 4 days. Easy enough to convert, but still unnecessary. Also, a nick that has been registered for a long time should get a little bit more protection than a new one. In the past, we have sometimes asked users to wait a bit longer before requesting old nicks to be dropped. To make things easier and fairer, we have decided to change and simplify our official policy.

Starting on 2011-04-01, the expiry time will be 70 days, i.e. 10 weeks. For every full year of registration time, one week is added to the expiry time. Thus, a nick that's been registered for three and a half years needs to have been unused for 13 weeks before another user can request to have it dropped.

We are pre-announcing this change as it would be unfair towards users to change expiry times just before their  60 days of waiting are over.  As usual, barring manual database cleanups every few years, we won't drop nicks or channels on our own, but only at a user's request.