It seems like when the big reddit migration happened, a lot of new users claimed magazine names on kbin instances that were popular on reddit in order to have ownership of them, but they seemingly have no interest in posting content to them. This has unfortunately caused lot of otherwise useful magazines to remain dormant, vacant, and unused.
Would it make sense to have these ghost magazines expire or have a system for changing ownership of them if no one uses them? It’s a shame if the good names are taken and immediately abandoned, and it’s not a great user experience to look for communities only to find so many empty and abandoned magazines.
I’m curious what opinions are regarding this matter. Thanks.
Completely empty magazines could probably be automatically deleted after a month. Anything with actual posts should probably be reviewed by an actual human, and only deleted manually. Even if there’s only one post, it could be a very useful post that shouldn’t be deleted. Or maybe the magazine is being used as a “signpost” to direct people elsewhere, like r/traa pointing to r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns.
The process of flagging magazines for review could still be automated. Maybe each post made delays the review flag by a week, that way active magazines won’t come up. Admins could also “snooze” the flag for a set amount of time, or disable it permanently for some magazines.
Magazines that are abandoned but still have useful content should be actively advertised somewhere as “available for adoption”. The same goes for magazines that are reported by users as unmoderated.