Level1Techs has no feature to delete accounts/data!

For all the security stuff you guys cover, about sites recording forever peoples personal information, there is no option to just delete account&data.

Now my reasons for wanting to do this are not really security but more of the fact I don’t need two forum accounts to this site. But still, its surprising you haven’t got this baked into the forum @wendell !!

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I too feel this is very odd for such a site as this! :slight_smile:

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Discourse does not work well will deleting accounts, although it is possible.

If you wish your account can be anonymized.

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Yes pretty much this. @anon63470048

It kinda depends on how much posts you made with a said account.
We prefer to use anonymization of accounts simply because,
it causes less stress on the back end.
With anonymization of the account all the user credentials like registration mail etc,
are being deleted.
And the user name is rendered to a random anonymous name.
Only the posts re main.

I can anonymize your account if you wish to, just send me a pm.
Basically not many forums have a feature for users to delete their own posts,
or deleting their own accounts actually.
This is generally always being done by moderation or staff on request.

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Oddly enough, Wendell was just talking about this sort of thing on the News where some companies are not set-up to include data/account deletion and that a request to that company to do so could be very costly for an IT dept to carry out.

Well such things need to be laws to be worth implementing cause we value you bro :slight_smile:

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What if child porn or terrorism. We much have your logs till the end of time or a law.

Im being a dick but everyone keep data cause…It just you could make a L1 account share info then poof . That would be handy !

on top of what misteryangel said, you could manually delete all your post first, then go get your account anonymized leaving nothing or near nothing.

Yep. They should fix this

You guys are free to put in a feature request over at https://meta.discourse.com

If you need your data removed from the site you can PM any @moderators

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lol I remember when Tsk put a feature request in they basically told him to pound sand

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How do you delete me …so I dont get caught :slight_smile:

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Technically he wanted a feature ‘reversion’

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The only way to solve this is to build a new forum architecture. Stop using Ruby and JavaScript! They don’t care about your data. They don’t want us to be happy.

Please note the above is sarcasm and meant to be taken as a joke. I get paid to work with Ruby professionally. I do not oppose Ruby. In fact I embrace Ruby like miners in northern Africa. But I do disagree with the Discourse devs more than a little.

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Well of course as Level1Techs is not reside in the EU,
and there for we are not subject to GDPR.
All user contributions (posts and uploads) are basically licensed under the user content license,
that people agree to when they register an account to forum. (check out our tos)

https://forum.level1techs.com/tos

Thats why anonymization is a nice tool. :slight_smile:
This way usefull posts are not being lost.

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Forgive my ignorance on the matter, but what exactly is done to “anonymize” an account?

@The_Riddick, @anon63470048

Allow me to educate you a bit.

Deletion is possible, but only for accounts with very little activity.

The reason is that in order to not break database cardinality when the DELETE cascades it locks tables from being updated until it’s done.

So a very active user could actually take the whole site down from this action for hours at a time. This is why this feature is not implemented on the end user side and why we choose to anon accounts.

We get like at least one person asking to be annonomyzied every other week. So if the site because that unstable no one would want to use it.

So don’t wail and complain when my hands are tied. Afteral, it is possible for each and every single user to go back to every single one of their posts and edit them (except for archived) . So if you really want it to be done there is nothing stopping you.

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With anonymizing a account by request.
All the user affiliated account data like registration email etc is getting deleted.
The user name will be changed to a random annon name tag.
But the posts the said user made stays un changed.
Of course posts that people contribute to our forum fall under the user content license,
that people agree to when register an account.

So although we could eventually delete an account with all its user posts on highly request.
But it generally is depending on the amount of posts a said user account has made,
and how old the said account is.
Because when deleting an account all their posts and created topics are getting deleted as well.
And in case of topics, it will also delete posts from other users in that said topic.
This is one of the reasons why deleting accounts just causes allot of stress on the back end.
And with accounts that have more then like 5K posts, it’s already going to trow some errors.

That is the main reason why we just use anonymization instead.

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Excellent. Thanks for the thorough response!

Followup question for the sake of curiosity, does this also change the account name when a user was quoted by another user in the topic?

As far as i’m aware yes.

Edit: just double checked it, and yes it does.

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