I noticed that lots of projects that are running on a version of node that is too old and doesn’t work anymore and have been abandoned. There are tons of these projects, and they are taking up tons of domains. I wanted to know if it was possible to rename the project to a generated name like you do with new projects if the project has not been visited for a while, such as 6-12 months.
This would free up used domains and open them for new people.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to penalize someone for their app not getting visited for awhile - also we don’t even track that, so it would have to be based on something we do know like recent edits. We also hadn’t historically deprecated Node versions, so that’s very new to Glitch and the community, which means to do this the right way we’d need to take some time in really making policies known before we were to remove a domain from someones project to make available for others.
I appreciate you raising this idea, though! It’s something we do need to think about, so I’m giving my opinion here not to dismiss yours but to make sure folks who read this do not think we’re going to take their project names away any time soon.
I think a nice solution would be to like every 12 months Glitch would send out an email to people with projects that no longer work, e.g. deprecated node versions, unavailable websites, etc. If that person did not click a button in the email or reply to the email in 6 months then the projects would get renamed.
I have also seen a lot of projects with great domains that are just remixes of starters with no content at all. I understand those might be a little more difficult to track, but it would be nice to do the same thing for them.
Yep. I like that a lot.
Glitch usually tracks changes using Git as “checkpoints”, so if there are not many check points by the user after a remix, the email notification could be triggered
(sorry for bumping this)
It actually seems like Glitch could have something like this in place (kind of). I found this banner while exploring Glitch’s application. variable in the editor.
(“View Restrictions” goes here)
Wow! Very interesting and cool!
That variable reveals so many cool things that Glitch does.
: - )
Yea, it was using a thing called “ot client” that could be found from that variable that wh0 made a functioning chat app that could work inside the glitch editor. (I’m working on bring it back btw)
It (the variable) has a bunch of cool stuff to help building userscripts and extensions, like renaming, deleting, reading, editing and creating files and assets, opening and closing dialogs, triggering multiple stuff, getting user info, reading logs and rewind, etc…
I’ve actually used it before to add autocompletions, and I’m working on adding a new secret and really helpful feature.
Let me know if you’re trying out the autocompletions…
: - )
I would really love to try it, but does it support firefox yet?
Sorry, no. Not yet. I’ve still not got a way to fix the missing issue of firefox (read the README on GitHub to see it).
As much as I agree with you all about claiming inactive domains, I believe that URLs should be permanent. I know that Tumblr exactly does release old domains and I hate it. We just have to be creative about domain names, or if you can afford one, buy your own one.
I completely understand, but here we’re talking about domains that are completely unused, e.g. just remixes with no edits of starter projects - or at least that would be the ideal solution to this idea
I’m old enough to remember the times when new Glitch projects only had two words in the default project name 
