It certainly wouldn't bother me.if it was an admin selectable option and you personally chose to disable it for your forum, it would still bother you that it was available for other admins to use on their forums?
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
Actually a mechanism where a user can deactivate an account might not be a bad idea. In this scenario the user does NOT remove any posted content but only flips a switch that moves them to a usergroup that cannot log in and sets all email, social group and other content methods to null.
We all know there are settings to stop emails and other contacts but lets face facts, our users for the most part are not that forum savvy, only a handful avail themselves of more than a few site features. This gives the user the needed "unsubscribe" button from the site.
How about this - members have access to a "Remove Account" (or maybe "Close Account") button. The administrator would have options in the AdminCP for controlling the behavior of this button - for example, it could deactivate the account (so the user couldn't log in to it anymore), hide all profile information from public view, remove the member from the Members List, and turn off any notifications or messaging to the member. The member's threads and posts could be deleted (hard or soft), allowed to remain but attributed to "Guest", or remain as they are (attributed to the member's original username). This way, the account could still be recoverable, the administrator would still have access to the member's information, and the member would not have to worry about their profile information being publicly accessble. Finally, there could be an option for the "Remove Account" button to actually delete the account for those who really need it.
Honestly, this is a frequent issue on many forums and it would be a blessing to have built -in functionality to deal with it automatically rather than doing so personally on a case by case basis. Members should be able to ensure that their profile information is not publicly accessible and allowing them to do so themselves can save a lot of headaches.
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