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

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.