0.11.30 — an abandoned login lies fallow

The previous release gave the reader a login and a rule: one change every 24 hours. The rule watched only one side of the act, though. Changing a login is two things at once — taking a new name and abandoning the old one — and the abandoned name went back into the pool immediately. Anyone waiting for somebody else's login got it in the same second.

This is not a question of tidiness. The signature under a comment is a string recorded at the moment of sending and does not change when its author changes login later. A name taken over a minute after its release therefore produces a state in which the old sentences carry a string and the new ones carry the same string belonging to somebody else. From the outside there is no way at all to tell the two apart.

So an abandoned login goes into keeping for 24 hours — exactly as long as the interval between changes. The two periods are the same number on purpose: at the moment its owner may change login again, their old name is returning to the pool. There is no window in which somebody else can take a name the owner is not yet allowed to reach for.

The owner is the exception: stepping back onto your own previous name is allowed straight away, because stepping back is not a takeover of somebody else's signature but the withdrawal of your own change. Automatically assigned logins are not kept — nobody chose them or signed anything with them deliberately, and a four-digit pool is too small to litter with reservations left by accounts that wore a number for their first five minutes.