Thoughts on deleting member accounts

Just out of interest (am actually writing some documentation here) do you delete member accounts on request.

We do if people ask, but don't if the person doesn't ask. We used to regularly clean out accounts where people joined but didn't post, but weirdness we got people who hadn't posted in like six months asking where their accounts had gone. Even more strange we had people who had never posted complaining (and that is just strange imho)

So what do you do. Please no flaming in this thread it's an honest question.

[filburt1]

It's definitely not a good idea to delete users with no posts. Many (obviously not the majority) users sign up to just read and have their customized preferences and never post.

Some get around that by deleting from last activity of a year ago and no posts. However the way vB is designed, there is only an extraordinarily tiny puny performance and storage hit for keeping accounts versus deleting them.

(this thread won't help...)

[N9ne]

My user table is 1.3MB and my DB is over 100MB. I have 5555 members; deleting users won't help me in anyway.

I don't delete accounts, ever. If a person requests their account to be deleted, I just ban it, same effect, as they can't really use it.

Doesn't worry me. There's a surprising amount of people online who help out in cases.

If people specifically want their accounts erased from your board, surely the moral and ethical thing to do is to remove their accounts. Remember the question is, if people request their accounts are removed, not in the general course of tiding up your member lists.

Anyone else noticed you now have the option of taking yourself off spam lists, look at the bottom of spam mail, the option is there. Apparently a similar thing applies to any online membership list. This was news to myself and a number of other people, am actually following this one up as it may be of interest to the entire vBulletin community.

Am running this poll at a number of sites to get some raw figures before publishing results. Currently ... just checking a couple of other places ..... 75% yes they will delete accounts on one site, 100% on another site (whoa the thread ran into three pages of people relating bad stories in regards their accounts not being deleted at some site or other, admins reading PMs ... which actually has to be acknowledged on site under Oz law apparently, and other really non decent actions by site owners). Gee there's a lot of anger out there.

Lets try and keep this one above the flaming level folks, we probably all have personal stories of just plain stoopid admins. If you are going to give us the story of your expierance please don't mention site names or people's online usernames as this could quickly degenerate.

I'm finding this interesting, and am learning a lot about various US enforcement agencies at the same time, you US people really do have some scary folks in government.

[Xenon]

When a user asks to be deletet i talk to him if it's really nessesary, if he sais yes, i have to and will delete it's account.

inactive members won't be deleted.

Today at 03:20 AM N9ne said this in Post #3
My user table is 1.3MB and my DB is over 100MB. I have 5555 members; deleting users won't help me in anyway.

I don't delete accounts, ever. If a person requests their account to be deleted, I just ban it, same effect, as they can't really use it.

Dude have you ever had anyone request their user account be deleted and if so what was the reason. We had a couple of people request it, as they didn't like the lack of profanity filters at one of our sites. Fair enough imho, we aren't to everyone's taste if people want their accounts removed we do so. Remember the question is on people asking for accounts to be deleted.

Heck your site is rocking along, where do you get the members and if you have any spare

Today at 03:25 AM Xenon said this in Post #5
When a user asks to be deletet i talk to him if it's really nessesary, if he sais yes, i have to and will delete it's account.

inactive members won't be deleted.

Thanks Xenon. That's about our policy as well, you have this strange thing of deleting non active accounts, and then people complain. Guess you can't win huh .....

[filburt1]

Your analogy to spam lists is flawed for a couple reasons:

1. In the case of a spam list, you didn't explicitly request to join. Also remember that by default vB has double opt-in (loose for the analogy but the idea is there: e-mail confirmation after signup).

2. In the case of a spam list, you're receiving messages and not posting. In the case of forums, it's mostly posting messages. The way to opt out of that is to disable all contact options in your user CP (including admin e-mails), log out, and simply not return.

For the view of a forum administrator, it's useful to keep accounts to have records of IP addresses, e-mail addresses, etc. so multiple accounts don't correspond to the same user (a rule violation at most forums).

[filburt1]

BTW, I believe we don't delete accounts here. If somebody joins with an inappropriate username, we just edit the name.

[N9ne]

@Jethro: I've had some users ask to delete their account for just one reason, and that is that they don't want to post anymore so it's a little pointless.

My members, well I wish I knew where they were coming from, they're like ants