Total of 2 Million Accounts Disappear
February 23, 2009 analysis, last names 5 Comments((
I previously wrote that 800,000 accounts had disappeared from in-world search since mid-January, 2009. The SLNameWatch census bot has continued to count last names since then, as usual. Heritage names, including names that came and went before I founded SLNameWatch.com, are only scheduled to be counted every 3 months, since we don’t normally expect rapid changes on names that are no longer available. Therefore, these numbers come in slowly. Nevertheless, the fact is, the more I survey name usage, the more accounts are suddenly missing. The total now stands at 2,024,371 accounts. This amounts to 15 percent of all accounts with heritage last names.
Some of the names still haven’t been counted since the purge started. So, I expect this figure to keep increasing. It may be that more and more accounts are being deleted, or it may just be that it takes a while for my census bot to notice, or both.
Meanwhile, I now know that the Total Accounts figure was intentionally removed from the economic statistics page. The economic statistics page is back, and everything is intact (in XML format, now), except the total accounts figure. *Shrug*. The bright side is, SLNameWatch is now the authority on the total number of accounts in Second Life®! 
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