Many of us have a habit of creating accounts for services that might capture our interest for a bit only to never log into them again. I remember when I first signed up for Twitter back in 2007, barely used it for a few weeks and didn’t return to properly use Twitter until 2010. It’s common for such services to hold on to usernames so that whenever those users want to return they feel like they never left, but if you haven’t logged into Tumblr for over two years, your username might soon be automatically deleted.
Tumblr has revealed that it’s conducting maintenance on its end and emailing users who haven’t signed in for more than two years, “a lot’s changed in two years and we think they’d be excited to see what’s new,” it says.
It will give those users the chance to log in again and pick up right where they left off, if those users don’t respond to the email then they will essentially be allowing their usernames to expire.
However Tumblr says that even if their usernames experience it will hold on to their content, their data essentially” for when they decide to return but then they’ll have to pick out a new URL and username.
So even if you don’t use Tumblr but would like to preserve your username it would be best to log in again so that the username doesn’t get deleted automatically, it won’t be possible to claim a URL manually from Tumblr, so if you lose it you might end up losing it for good.
Tumblr isn’t exactly doing something new with this maintenance, rather it has taken a page out of its parent company Yahoo’s book, which did pretty much the same thing in 2013.