[Suggestion] Give User an Option to self-delete their Account

Its much like when MySpace was popular and they changed too many features of the service, MILLIONS of people bolted out of the door by deleting accounts. Same with Facebook and their PR nightmare with regards to privacy.

And yes, desert or ghost town is right.

It certainly wouldn't bother me.

I've always regarded changing a forum feature as a two way process and a site owner should be recipient to feedback over any change. Likewise with any infraction. Allowing people to automatically delete their own accounts will result in people removing themselves in the heat of the moment without an opportunity for reflection and dialogue

There could be an admin accessible restore funtion to undo the deactivations (not the deletions though).

You may have checks but actually the feature can still be abused. All it takes it a stray login at work or home and someone who thinks they are a comedian

Anyway in my experience people who sincerely wish to leave will do so. A high proportion of what I would call attention seekers (I have no qualms in saying that) who shout about wanting to be deleted are soon on their way back with a re-registration. I am of the personal belief no development time need be used for such small matters when standard privileges to selected moderators and admin for closing accounts perfectly suffice

Running a large forum, we occasionally get people who want to 'resign'. Delete their account. Sometimes delete all their posts.
I absolutely do not think we should allow people to go through deleting their content en mass. Remove half of a conversation in a thread and it makes the rest nonsensical. Threads can very often be an archive of useful information and I do not want any member to sabotage that.
As for deleting their account, this is something I think some people might do in haste and then regret.
But I do think we should allow people to deactivate their accounts, removing them from all emails from our forum.
And I do think they should be entitled to reactivate their account at some point in the future.

With regard to removing all personal information, by default none is required to join most forums. Email addresses and DOBs are not means by which a person can be personally identified. Therefore even if the law in your country requires it, there would be no work for an admin to do. The member could any remove personal information from their own profile prior to deactivating their account.

I would not turn on this feature. I'm not a nazi admin - I just feel that threads should make sense in the context of how they were written. If you delete an account entirely and all that persons posts (A request I often refuse) then you leave gaping great holes in conversations - not good.... not good at all.

I like this idea. It does have to come with some optional permissions for the admin though.
Most of them have already been listed in the thread. Here's a collection of the best options:

• Hard delete: Delete user and all content (illadvised to use since it will break threads and conversations)
• Hard delete: Delete user and set the content to be posted as a guest(with the name of the user)
• Soft delete: Soft-delete user and all of the user's content (also illadvised since it will break threads and conversations)
• Soft delete: Soft-delete user and set the content to be posted as a guest(with the name of the user).
• Inactive: Put user in an "Inactive" usergroup, kind of like Banned but different markup(e.g. not striked) and obviously not saying "Banned". Let all content stay

If undeleted the content will be linked to the user again

• Make this an admin option
• Allow admin to set a "graceperiod" to how much time has to pass before that username can be used again when registering a new account
• Store a history log of who have deleted their accounts

I complete agree with this! I just keep receiving emails from members (10 in the last 2 months!) to delete their account from my site. Obviously I will never delete any of their content , but I need to put them in a special usergroup all the time myself now . This is too admin unfriendly / frustrating and an option for a user to do this by themselves would come in very handy I would think. The reason why I receive rather a lot of these emails is because of the subjects matters discussed on my site which are very personal and privacy-sensitive. An option for the user to disconnect their account themselves would be truly a much needed time saver for me.

Amen. Wholeheartedly agree with every word you are so clearly stating!

Many people seem to like/want/need a function so that an user can de-activate (and the admin can set options how this is then going to work on the site) their account by themselves. If we can see the Suggestion like this (because it actually talks about deleting, which is exactly the thing we don't want), then please [like] the first posting (only 12 'likes' so far). I think it's a really welcome feature for forum software and XenForo could be the first to offer it.

I just wanted to do so, as you closed thread where I wanted to discuss about pricing of XF, thread was closed without any explanation and by me without good reason

So let me help you with advice, people like to have an option to delete their profiles, this option is not included with XF as far as I know

And please delete my profile as I dont want to be a part of community where stuff like this happend

Thank you very much and wishing you good luck!

Cheers

Also there is no option to edit title of thread, or certain user groups are limited to do so which is (by me) wrong....

i like to see a "delete my account and all data" option, this is something every online system (fb, myspace ...) should have...

That has already been suggested: http://xenforo.com/community/thread...-an-option-to-self-delete-their-account.2720/

Please discuss it on that thread.

Dumb idea in my opinion. Too often a poster will have a momentary meltdown, as demonstrated by the OP, and hastily delete their profile. For frequent posters, this would leave massive holes in the board conversations. I have several members who have "left" over a dozen times and demanded that all their posts leave with them. That would amount to 10,000+ posts. A big mess in my opinion.

Dumb idea or not, it's a legal necessity in some areas.

Threads merged then to avoid discussion on the same subject being split across two threads.

Okay.. I think having the options below should cover everybody's needs and be flexible for any type of community. Whether or not you're in favour of account deletion is frankly personal opinion and can be argued both ways. Without the option there though, forum owners could find themselves in a legal headache that's more troublesome than conversation holes in threads.

Selectable AdminCP Options:
No option for account deletion

Allow users to delete account <-- this entails removal of the account but posts will turn into guest posts with the same username
Allow users to delete account pending admin approval

Allow users to delete account and all postings
Allow users to delete account and all postings pending admin approval

With the admin approval options, there should be a box for members to make a compelling case for why they want their account deleted.

Take a user who has started a lot of threads, if they delete their account and all their data what happens to the threads? In vBulletin, whole threads were deleted (the only time we ever tried it, a few years back) which led to other users demanding to know what happened to their posts and assuming that the mods had deleted it or hidden it.

You could, I suppose, replace the data that belonged to the deleted account with some place holder text stating that it was deleted by the user themselves.

Deleting the account and retaining the posts is probably a self-defeating exercise as users will tend to post about the event, the deleted data may well have been quoted with name of quoted/deleted user and link to deleted post, it is also possible/likely that the deleted data could be re-posted by people who have saved threads and the deleted account named.

So much hassle!

I'd find this idea very useful and I know one of the places I mod for is run completely from Germany where they are legally required to allow people to remove their data however they currently have a system on their games where there is a countdown of 3 days where only at the end is the account deleted and they can cancel any time within this countdown and they are thinking of making a mod to do this on the forum. So if as most people agree there is a way for Admins to be able to select to enable the option to delete or deactivate accounts I think they should also be able to define a countdown for how long a delete takes. I think this is a good idea to stop rash actions as it will allow people time to calm down if they decide they don't really want to delete.