What do you do when a member passes away?

[MapleOne]

First of all, let me say how sad this is, my condolences to friends and family.

Secondly...​

I notice Xenforo forum does this when someone passes away




I recently had two members pass away on my forum and I leave the profile untouched other than



I figured that was a respectful solution, especially because I did not want to bother relatives for a birth and death day.


If the member is very active you may also get bounced emails if a relative deactivates the email and I solved that by doing this...

catch+membername@myforumname.ca

This way I can make a folder with the term "catch" and all emails will go into that folder without any bounces.
I traditionally leave the email as is until I get the bounce notifications and because Xenforo requires an email address in every account I figured this was a good way to do it. Using one email for all members that have passed away does not work because each account email has to be different so adding catch+membername solves that.



Anyway, my apologies for asking about this, but when I saw the in memoriam part it got me to thinking about how I handled it on my forum.

 

[Mendalla]

We have a "Rest In Peace" group that adds a banner. We also have an In Memoriam forum where we post whatever information we have, an obit if we can find one or the family provides one. Sadly, we are an aging bunch and not all in good health so there will be a few more threads in that forum before too long.

 

[Paul B]

If the member is very active you may also get bounced emails if a relative deactivates the email and I solved that by doing this...

Just set the account user state to Disabled .

 

[MapleOne]

Just set the account user state to Disabled .

I thought of that but in both cases the sons went into the fathers accounts to make the announcements and to post updates so I did not want to deactivate the accounts.

We have high value assets which usually get left to a family member on death and transactions happen on our forum so I cannot deactivate. The family members need access to the records.

 

[Rhody]

We have a group called "RIP (Deceased member)", which changes their custom title to "Rest In Peace", and strips the account of all security.

The old posts remain.

 

[FTL]

If the member is very active you may also get bounced emails if a relative deactivates the email and I solved that by doing this...

Besides deactivation, as an admin, you can also leave the account active and just remove the email address, leaving that field blank. You can also create accounts without email addresses, which is very handy for test accounts that don't need email alerts.

 

[Mendalla]

I thought of that but in both cases the sons went into the fathers accounts to make the announcements and to post updates so I did not want to deactivate the accounts.

In one case on our site, a granddaughter joined and handled that under her own account rather than ghosting on her grandmother's account. In most other cases, we did not have a family contact involved, just learned about the deaths through community connections, obits, etc. So I would say it really depends on how the family wants to handle things. Deactivating is safest but you could make an exception for the scenario you give.

 

[motowebmaster]

I don't do anything unless a surviving family member requests it. I never share the cause of a member's passing, and the community usually respects that even if they know what happened.

 

[pattycake2]

We have a "Rest In Peace" group that adds a banner. We also have an In Memoriam forum where we post whatever information we have, an obit if we can find one or the family provides one. Sadly, we are an aging bunch and not all in good health so there will be a few more threads in that forum before too long.

Would you be able to let me use that same banner - very nice touch and, how do you set the banner to show to everyone when a person dies?