What is your "policy" on account deletion
 

Over the last couple of years I have noticed a trend towards people wanting their accounts deleting rather than leaving a dormant account.

From a site administrator point of view this is a somewhat painful process as vBulletin doesn't really have a simple "click to delete this account" button, and to be honest I am not sure if this could every be reliably implemented (think about quoted posts).

So, the question is what is your "policy" when somebody asks for their account to be deleted?

Our policy is not to delete accounts. If people do not want to use their account anymore they can simply stop visiting.

My policy is we only delete accounts with 0 posts. Otherwise, the account will be banned. On request i'll remove email and ip information associated with an account, members are free to remove their own posts if they wish.

I set them to a "retired" usergroup (which is just banned) and send them on their way.

I only delete accounts under 5 posts (usually, they are spambots).
In other cases, it just gets left in peace and nobody touches it.
The only reason I'd delete accounts higher than 5 posts is either the person has died or no longer among us.

I never delete accounts unless they're maybe spambots or such like.

Our policy (Cable Forum) is not to delete any accounts (including spammers) as it keeps an ip record for future reference. The only time an account ever gets deleted is if we merge two accounts.

I accidently pruned all members that never logged in for 30 days xD I usually ban them forever :p

You ban people who havent logged in for 30 days ??

I allow account deletion on my forum. In fact, I go through the accounts every few months and prune it down to about 80K users. I don't know why we picked that number, but we did. It basically gets rid of all accounts that haven't been touched for six months or so.

Wow huh! Bad idea... I have members coming back from years ago. Members that are back on the staff now... long lost friends. that's just cutting your own throat so to speak.

If someone is persistant I will delete their account but, I'm with Paul on this........

NO what i meant was, member that haven't logged in for 30 days and have 0 posts i accidently pruned the accounts. & The people who want their account deleted, i ban them forever :erm:

Ah, makes a bit more sense now.

I allow it but it must come form the ip they registered at. If not then it will not be removed.

That's kinda pointless, now with the invention of Dynamic IP's that change.

Interesting, thanks for the replies.

Out of curiosity have any of you received requests for all posts etc to be deleted?

Requests to delete all posts are mostly denied. As others can also have posted in the same thread, removing the posts of 1 user can make threads unreadable or senseless.

If someone wants to have posts removed, then they will need to request it for every single post by reporting the post and giving a reason for deletion.

A few days ago I received a hateful private message from a member, demanding that I remove her account and delete all of her post - all 6,000 of them. The private message included some rather foul language directed at me. I was rather happy to ban her account and remove all of her post. This was not the first time that she "demanded" that I remove her account and her post, but it will be the last time.

As for deleting accounts, I'll delete the account if:
Their email is bouncing.
They never made a single post.

But here lately, I have been thinking of changing the setting of those accounts to "not to receive admin emails."

Try running a political site, I get PM's like that on a regular basis. However, I do not and never have deleted accounts unless it's something that is truly harmful to or from a user, such as death threats, etc. I also make this clear in my FAQ.

Account is De-activated after 90 days. I don't delete ! any coming back member has to go through activation process.

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.