Recycling Blog Names

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A WordPress.com blog owner can choose, at any time, to permanently delete his/her blog. There are any number of reasons someone may want to do this, and we certainly respect their wishes and decisions.

Blogs that have been deleted by the owner will remain deleted. We cannot, under any circumstances, allow someone to take over a blog name that was previously owned and deleted by its original/previous owner. Please do not submit support requests asking us to do this.

Think about it: imagine you have a blog for a while but then decide to delete it for personal reasons. We then let someone else take over the name. A year later you get an angry phone call from a friend or relative who has clicked on an old bookmark, reads something offensive, and thinks that it was published by you. This is precisely why our policy is, and will remain, in place.

Please note that the blog domains currently used do not represent a hindrance to registering yourself a new blog. If you were lucky enough to get an account here early, your domain selection was rather vast. If not, there is an infinite variety of unused names that you can invent. You can even register a custom domain for use with your blog so that the original ‘wordpress.com’ domain/URL is never visible to your readers.

On some previous occasions, we have reclaimed names that conflict with our trademarks or products, and a few times, for Automattic employees. As it clearly states in our Terms of Service, we can delete or reclaim any account for any reason. We call these “eminent domains.” Historically we have never done this to an active blog.

It is possible that, in future, we will consider reclaiming blog names that have been stockpiled by spammers and squatters and never used (although we make absolutely no promises that this will happen).

Last modified: January 26, 2012