Removal of Old IMVU Messages - Reactions & Solutions

Don Von Alpha Dom
by Don Von Alpha Dom · 24 posts
3 years ago in IMVU News
Posted 3 years ago · Author
In an announcement made by IMVU staff on September 24th 2020, plans were revealed by IMVU staff to start automatically deleting old messages from IMVU inboxes. Mass deletion of said user data has been slated to start November 1st 2020, only a month from now, leaving many users rushing to screen shot and copy / paste hundreds and thousands of messages before they are lost forever.

In all of this chaos, many users have been asking "Is there a way to easily and quickly download my messages before they are deleted". The answer to that question is, yes. There is an IMVU message saving tool made by The IMVU Mafias, which can do exactly that: viewtopic.php?p=164889#p164889

Here at the IMVU Mafias, we understand the importance of reliable data warehousing, accountability, and the personal value of one's own message history. IMVU has been around for nearly 2 decades now, and during that time, many of us have lost fellow IMVU users to death, heat break, and simply moving on; but that does not make those messages any less important to us. We have found and lost many a kindred soul, have been loved to, have been cried to, and have been lied to; all recorded within our IMVU messages.

Bellow, you can read the announcement made by IMVU Staff.

IMVU Staff wrote:
We will be removing the following two intertwined features on November 1st, 2020 or shortly after.

IMVU messages before October of 2013 will be removed from your inboxes. We recommend that users save any of these old messages that matter to them. Our data indicates that the majority of our users do not look at them.
In the My Rankings of the avatar legacy homepage we are removing the Gifts ranking but keeping the rest of the Rankings. The reason for this removal is because it is linked with the old IMVU messages. - https://avatars.imvu.com/ShannonMac

The removal of old IMVU messages will save IMVU a significant amount of storage space.

Best,

Shannon Mac, IMVU Senior Community Manager


Source: https://help.imvu.com/s/question/0D54p0 ... y-homepage

Fellow IMVU user, Tidus, perfectly expressed and broke down the insanity of this decision by IMVU inc in the following quote.

Tidus wrote:
Have you ever heard of any other platform wanting/needing to remove older messages to save a "significant amount of storage space"...? No, you haven't. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Discord, Instagram, LINE, WeChat, Kik, Telegram, Microsoft, Google, and every other Internet company with lots of users that you've ever heard of has never done this, and never will. No service that collects this much data would delete old messages from users unless users asked them to. It's a breach of user trust to inform people that their old messages will be removed in a month, and they can't even pay to keep them.

Do you know how much text fits in to a tiny file the size of an MP3? Over three million characters. Most IMVU users will never type that many characters in to private messages during their entire time on IMVU. I haven't typed that much text in private messages, and I've been here 15 years. As a test, I created a 3 MB text file full of everyday English text... then compressed it using the most common method, ZIP. The new file was 30K, one hundred times (100x) smaller. If IMVU wanted to keep all the text that every user they will ever have ever writes for the next 100 years, they easily could.

If IMVU cared about the effect this would have on users, they would ask them about this in advance... and would give them the option to opt-in to keeping that old user data instead of forcing them to try to manually back it up themselves. If IMVU actually needed to save "storage space", they would let users choose to automatically delete their own older messages... or let users manually delete them up to a certain date in the past. They should do both of those things today anyway. Instead, they made a decision for all their users... and as always, they simply told their users instead of asking them.

Based on what I've seen IMVU do in the past, this decision was made because removing this data saves them money. It likely lets them turn off old infrastructure without moving its data somewhere new. It may also save them from fixing the performance of their databases, where this data lives. Deleting this data could also protect IMVU from liability. IMVU says that "the majority of our users do not look at them"... but even if only 1% of their users do, IMVU has 200 million users... so that would impact over two million people. For me, this is eight years of messages that take up no space on their storage.

IMVU has created yet another problem, and "solved" it by taking things away from us. They make it incredibly difficult to read old messages, use that as a reason to justify their removal, and won't even give us a way to automatically download them all. Long term users who supported IMVU from the start (and who actually still spend money on it) are again treated the worst. No other large Internet company I've ever heard of neglects its community, let alone at this level... and neglect like this just keeps happening. If you support IMVU as they ruin their community, you've chosen to ignore the facts.
Posted 3 years ago
I totally agree with Tidus comment on IMVU removal of messages on our imvu inbox...he has spoken the truth..specially long time supporter of IMVU...who has devoted there time/effort and money on imvu. They did not even gaved us the capability of downloading our important messages. thanks to DM for making IMVU message saver. Please follow this topic. viewtopic.php?p=164889#p164889 Be safe everyone.
Posted 3 years ago
I agree with Tidus too but I would like to point out they are currently storing more than just user messages. They are also storing all the staff messages too. And you know how many those IMVU sends out in a day. Also each message isn't just text, it's a database record, which has a lot of other data associated with it.
Posted 3 years ago
I totally agree with DataMine as well.....and we understand the Storage that imvu would save if they delete all those stored massages....but if only IMVU has given the users the means to download all those messages ? Thanks to DataMine for making this program ....and give us the choice of downloading some important memories.....messages that some of us had kept for many many years....Thank you for all the hard work....it is greatly appreciated. Be safe everyone.
Posted 3 years ago
i agree smh. this is so petty of them.
Posted 3 years ago
Just a reminder guys, I made a program that can save your messages if that's something you're interested in.

You can download and find more info about here: viewtopic.php?p=164889#p164889
Posted 3 years ago
I think imvu should do an opt out method that way people who dont get online anymore would be the only ones losing messages and others who are around can juse opt out and keep the messages.
Posted 2 years ago
as far as im aware i got super scared and worried when i found out about this! but all of my DM's are there... sooo..... also i agree with Tidus's statement!
Posted 2 years ago
I find it a shame that we lose our old messages
Posted 2 years ago
@Don Von Alpha Dom


i agree

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