Account Deletion Procedure

[Post-Crisis D]

I think there needs to be a post with information regarding account deletion to explain the steps and process.

I see that some users have left the forum but their posts remain and I wonder if they agreed to leave their posts or if they thought the posts would be deleted when their accounts were deleted.  So I think it would be a good idea to have a post explaining the steps.

Do exiting users need to manually delete their posts if they don't want them left behind?  Do they have to specifically request their accounts and all content be deleted?  Or do they have to delete all their content manually before requesting their account be closed?

And, if they agree to leave their content but change their mind at a later date, after their account has been deleted, how do they go about requesting their content be removed?

I think clarity here would be useful.

[TimothyEllis]

The GDPR mod allows for people to delete their own accounts, and it then renames the posts left behind as Guest#### where # is a random number. It also removes the IP address information off the posts. The same mod allows people to download their posts and profile information.

You can request I delete your account and all posts. If you started threads, I reserve the right to save the rest of the thread.

So yes, people need to manually delete their own posts before they delete their account. If they started any threads, these are different. Thread OP deletion requests have to come to a mod, who will look at what else is on the thread and determine if other people's posts need saving first, and then will delete the post.

After they delete their username, they lose all ability to delete anything left behind. In which case, future deletions have to be done by an admin or moderator.

So delete posts first. Delete username when there is nothing left you would ever want deleted.

[TimothyEllis]

Deletion of your own account was turned off, due to people abusing it, with the result we lost entire threads because the account was the first poster.

Deletion can only be done now by contacting me. But I will try to talk you out of it, and it will take multiple requests to make sure you're not acting out of short term emotion.

If your account is going to be deleted, I will be trying to ensure there is no collateral damage to your posts being removed.

Be aware, any part of your posts which have been quoted by someone else, will remain.

[TimothyEllis]

Is it not possible to keep the posts started by a user and delete everything else? We already cannot remove our own posts if they started a thread.

Not with the current forum software.

If I'd designed it, the code would split off the first post, making the second post the new OP, and then allowing the old one to be deleted as a stand alone post. But even the GDPR mod doesn't do this.

The only way to do this at the moment is to request your OP post to be deleted, in which case I'll split your post out, and then you can delete it.

Mind you, a thread with nothing useful in it, may just be moved to moderator limbo, so it cant be seen, but retains the post counts.

I'll take each request as it comes, and discuss it.

[TimothyEllis]

Gotta love software

Yeah. As a coder from way back, I sometimes wonder why our civilization hasn't failed already with the way people code these days. 

[Jeff Tanyard]

Gotta love software

Yeah. As a coder from way back, I sometimes wonder why our civilization hasn't failed already with the way people code these days. 

The warning signs are already here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings