A question for more experienced Ottoneu commissioners/players - at what point do you consider a team abandoned?
Is it common practice to replace teams midseason if unable to reach them by message/email and they aren’t logging in (for over a month, for example)? Or is it better to replace teams during the offseason (since they paid for the team)?
Ideally it’s something that you discuss when you set up the league in terms of expectations when someone will be replaced for non-participation. Shit happens and lord knows that there are a million things more important than fantasy baseball. So it’s great if you can all agree at the beginning of the season that after “X” days of non-participation and non-communication, the league will look to find a replacement owner. Personally, I think 30+ days of inactivity is more than sufficient and possibly even less than a month if you have an agreement in place before the season starts. In my experience, the attrition rates for Ottoneu leagues are much lower than most other platforms, but they’re still non-zero.
I’ll just mention that non-participation can be a particularly acute problem in H2H leagues. One of the reasons why I don’t play H2H anymore (except for maybe football, undecided for 2022) is that non-participation can really screw up the standings. At the same time, I’ve been on the other side of this: when my daughter was born in mid-June 2018 and unexpectedly had to spend a week in the NICU, I didn’t get a chance to set my lineups for a few days. Someone in my H2H league gave me crap about my lineups and losing a matchup that I would have won had I been on top of things. As it turned out, I would have gone on to win the league that year had I won that matchup (finished 2nd), but I have absolutely no regrets since there are a million things more important than fantasy baseball (plus it wasn’t a prize league 
). But getting “shamed” for being unexpectedly absent for 3-4 days left a really bad taste in my mouth and I’m no longer in that league (there were other reasons).
Anyway… my point is that I think you need to set expectations and norms at the league level, preferably from the start. At the same time, temper the need to maintain competition with some compassion and understanding that everyone has many other things on their plate.
In your case, I’d probably go ahead and find a replacement owner if the person has been non-active for over a month and we’re just 6 weeks or so into the season. I would just post on the league message board that you’re going to make the change to make sure that no one has strong objections against it for whatever reason.
As a commissioner, I find that anyone who asks on the main message board about someone who has been inactive usually gets a response within a few days. And if not, I usually send an email directly to the owner to ask if they are still playing. If I get no reply for a week, I email again with a deadline, where if I don’t hear back I will find a new owner.