A lot of people don't like the idea of Trial Accounts, and we've been talking about them the past two days and don't really like them ourselves anymore. Once we went to implement them we found that the wording used to describe them throughout the site would've been impossible, and people would confuse permanent free accounts with permanent accounts, and so on.
Plus, all the points about it not being in the spirit of the site, arguments about isolated users without online friends, proliferation of account types... all true.
So, new plan!
We're just going to ditch invite codes altogether. Free users will be able to join without an invite code, and without a 30 day expiration. For the users who value their invite code collection, we'll let you redeem them for paid time, either for yourself or friends. (the exact exchange rate hasn't yet been decided, but we'll try and be generous).
For the users concerned with username namespace pollution, we'll start discussions in
lj_biz on policy for deleting inactive accounts after so much time. It'd probably be based on multiple criteria with multiple time periods. Also, we might limit number of accounts per email address to something really high, to hinder username collectors. Please, let's not discuss this here... wait for the lj_biz thread to pop up.For the users wanting LiveJournal to remain exclusive, please realize that was never our goal. We want everybody to enjoy the site, which is in the spirit of everybody enjoying Open Source software. If you want your personal account to remain exclusive, there are settings you can use to accomplish that, and we'll be making even more functionality to let you control what happens inside your account. But in general, the more people using the site, the more fun it is for everybody else.
Again, the goal for all this to happen is tomorrow. We're all busting our butts today working on it. Hopefully this version 2 plan will make even more people happy...... :-)
Update: See these two posts in
lj_biz about deleting inactive accounts and spammers/trolls and Karma/"Whoofie". Please reply in those threads about those issues, to focus discussion. 
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