What is your "policy" on account deletion

[TimberFloorAu]

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

[Marco van Herwaarden]

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

[TimberFloorAu]

Not if you do phrase replacement in phpmyadmin

[davidw]

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).

[Dean C]

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.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

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

[Rapscallion]

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

[abqtj]

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.