This is so in vogue at the moment on our site.

In the last 2 weeks, we have had 2 members DEMAND their account be deleeted.

We complied, but under protest. They then went on to demand their posts and threads be deleted, in fact the latter of the 2 members threatened legal action.

He wasnt joking neither.

Unfortunately, we had deleted him a couple of days ago,.. so all his posts were set to guest.
This made the task of pruning his threads/posts nigh on impossible ... but we hacked the database, and changed his username.

In future our policy will be to NOT to delete a user but to change their username.

We have made changes to forum rules, and our account termination policy !

This made a good read: http://www.forumdr.com/would-you-del...n-request/152/
I fixed your click-through redirect link for you ;) - davidw

If you rename accounts, then you will need to keep in mind that the original username will still be in quoted posts.

Not if you do phrase replacement in phpmyadmin

I had a user that was pretty popular in the spamming sense (he was very friendly and posted a lot of jokes/funnies/games/etc.) but the day we (admins) decided to not allow those posts to count, he decided he didn't want to be a part of my site. He requested heavily that I hard-delete his account, removing all his posts/account/etc., and while I refused each and every time, he found his way to another admin and they did the job for him. After I removed all admins, I put the user back in via SQL and everything was back the way it was before, but I made it a point not to give any newer admins such power in the future. I trusted these admins, but at the same time, one was still vulnerable to the power of persistence (and it helped that they were really good friends).

It's an interesting legal situation too. I know many online businesses which have had legal threats to remove their accounts. I am not sure whether they are legally obliged to do so but I'm sure there's some obscure EU law which they could use to prosecute a webmaster who does not comply with the request.

The problem is that is not too easy to determine jurisdiction.

Roughly every six months I'll prune inactive accounts. If someone has zero post count and hasn't logged in for ninety days, they go into a 'users to be deleted' group. I then mass mail them from the VB board system alerting them to the imminent removal of their account for non-use, then repeat this two weeks later. Two weeks after this, gone. Anyone getting back to me will have their account saved - that time.

I don't do this for any reason other than freeing up names other users may be interested in having.

Rapscallion

I do not delete accounts upon request. They can exercise some free will and not return if they like.

Spambots, inactive, etc. is another story and not what I thought the original question referred to.