delete account

[Elrick]

Just to be clear, I've been responding to Elrick and his idiotic rants.  A fool's errand, I know.

So someone suggests something and you start calling them an Idiot.  I suspect your own inept attempts to control people's criticism seems to show your own lack of etiquette in any case.

labtexc, you have your answer ("we don't do that").  Changing posts to "guest" is only marginally better than deletion in terms of maintaining thread coherence and continuity.

Can I ask why you care so much?  What's wrong with just not using the forum anymore?

He wants to control his own account and having it deleted is his concern, not yours in any case.  He isn't seeking your approval or recommendations, so why do you think that it's worth anything to him?

If you had the decency to allow his account deletion then do it, he doesn't need the shills or your mates berating him consistently for his decision here.  It's more to do with his own freedom to choose, which you have proven to all here he doesn't have that.  Don't make excuses as to why you can't do it because it's easily done but he doesn't need the typical nastiness from respondents here on this forum to make him feel horrible for even asking this question.

Of course I don't care what anyone's opinions are, except when it comes to removing someone's basic choice to do what they want with their own account here on Geekhack.  Remember he didn't sign nor approve to have his account to be held indefinitely hence if he was in the United States he could have a lawful case against this establishment and I'm sure the general media would love to here about his particulars (if this place denies his original request).

Of course in the EU Geekhack would have no standing whatsoever when it comes to retaining accounts or any other details relating to forum users, more power to the EU  .

[Pacifist]

Of course I don't care what anyone's opinions are, except when it comes to removing someone's basic choice to do what they want with their own account here on Geekhack.  Remember he didn't sign nor approve to have his account to be held indefinitely hence if he was in the United States he could have a lawful case against this establishment and I'm sure the general media would love to here about his particulars (if this place denies his original request).

Doesn't the copyright on every post make it so they don't have to delete accounts?

[Kayla]

Remember he didn't sign nor approve to have his account to be held indefinitely hence if he was in the United States he could have a lawful case against this establishment and I'm sure the general media would love to here about his particulars (if this place denies his original request).

His account is not his property. Just because you are an account holder on the internet doesn't mean you own the rights to the account legally. Due to that and many othr things, you cant bring legality up in this; otherwise you just look foolish. Stick to what you do best; embellishing on injustice. Facebook accounts cannot be deleted. Do something about it. Google data will never be cleared. Do something about it. When you create an account on a page you are agreeing to publish whatever you put into the fields and configure it however you wish in your settings. If an admin wants to ban you and keep your account as a record of that ban then that is within their power. Not that it is the case here but I'm just saiya-jin.

And by the way, nobody was 'nasty' until the OP insulted the forum and the admins in his retort about it being easy and having terrible forum software; then proceeded to demand his account be deleted.

[user 18]

According to the TOS, messages posted to GH are the property of GH.

Now, the way I look at this, is that while the content of the message belongs to the user, the message and the space it occupies on the board belongs to the board, and in a way, to the community.

The user is free to remove his or her personal information from the account, that's entirely possible and not an issue. The non-personal information (the post contents) are by definition not personal information, and are not protected under any sort of personal information protection law. It is now community content, and removing it from the community would cause damage to the community, and there's no real reason to have the information removed in the first place.

If he's truly concerned about the privacy aspect of it, all the information can be removed from his profile without much trouble. He can even do it himself -- profiles are freely editable. He can then throw in a random string as his new password, and essentially brick the account to stop anyone else posting in his name. However, I feel that's rather excessive.

Despite this, it has been politely requested and politely denied, so I don't see why we're still arguing about it. Possibly because we've had some people being somewhat less than polite at this point? In any case, unless someone specifically addresses me again, I'm washing my hands of this thread. It's a job for the admin team.

[hashbaz]

So someone suggests something and you start calling them an Idiot.  I suspect your own inept attempts to control people's criticism seems to show your own lack of etiquette in any case.

[snip]

He wants to control his own account and having it deleted is his concern, not yours in any case.  He isn't seeking your approval or recommendations, so why do you think that it's worth anything to him?

If you had the decency to allow his account deletion then do it, he doesn't need the shills or your mates berating him consistently for his decision here.  It's more to do with his own freedom to choose, which you have proven to all here he doesn't have that.  Don't make excuses as to why you can't do it because it's easily done but he doesn't need the typical nastiness from respondents here on this forum to make him feel horrible for even asking this question.

Of course I don't care what anyone's opinions are, except when it comes to removing someone's basic choice to do what they want with their own account here on Geekhack.  Remember he didn't sign nor approve to have his account to be held indefinitely hence if he was in the United States he could have a lawful case against this establishment and I'm sure the general media would love to here about his particulars (if this place denies his original request).

Of course in the EU Geekhack would have no standing whatsoever when it comes to retaining accounts or any other details relating to forum users, more power to the EU  .

Elrick and his idiotic rants.

^^Thank you for demonstrating, yet again.

OP's question has been asked and answered.  user 18 has summarized the situation very well.  I'd still like to know why it's so important to have the account itself nuked, but in the end, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[rowdy]

OP's question has been asked and answered.

Time to lock this thread?

[rowdy]

Case in point (if that is the right phrase): http://deskthority.net/keyboards-f2/ibm-key-does-not-click-any-more-t1063.html

The original post is "[Account and posts deleted on request]", so the first replace is totally without context.

The OP's other replies are also "[Account and posts deleted on request]" - so it's kinda like listening to only one half of a phone call.

Silly

[labtexc]

As i said ... i dont think deleteing posts is necessary (on the other hand, i could edit every post by myself) - but replacing the username with something like "guest" oder "deleted user (#0001)" and delete the account is from my point of view not a big deal.

but anyway ... thanks for all your feedback!
if you ever consider to change your opinion and start to delete account, dont froget mine

Bye

[Xowie]

OP's question has been asked and answered.  user 18 has summarized the situation very well.  I'd still like to know why it's so important to have the account itself nuked, but in the end, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Playing devils advocate:
Many people inadvertently post a lot of personal information over time on a form that they are involved with. Having an option to nuke an account is peace of mind that you did not leave something silly up when you permanently leave a community. Also, it seems like it is a bit of a liability having a lot of accounts open that you do not use for security reasons. Many people unfortunately reuse login credentials across forums. If a user database is hacked, you are potentially exposed.
The loss of continuity seems like a bit of a stretch of an excuse. A very determined person can go back and replace all of their posts with "...", which will have the same effect as just having the post deleted. Also the loss of one post in a discussion doesn't necessarily mean major loss of continuity to any given discussion. Furthermore, it seems that in reality there is a s small fraction of past discussions where continuity in reality would really matter.

[hashbaz]

Many people inadvertently post a lot of personal information over time on a form that they are involved with. Having an option to nuke an account is peace of mind that you did not leave something silly up when you permanently leave a community.

Again, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is an internet discussion board.  We've all done things to be embarrassed about in fits of nerd rage.

Also, it seems like it is a bit of a liability having a lot of accounts open that you do not use for security reasons. Many people unfortunately reuse login credentials across forums. If a user database is hacked, you are potentially exposed.

This is probably the best argument for account deletion or banning, though it is very easily mitigated.  You can change your forum password to something random to effectively lock it and remove the threat to your other accounts, and you should be changing the passwords on those other accounts regularly anyway.

The loss of continuity seems like a bit of a stretch of an excuse. A very determined person can go back and replace all of their posts with "...", which will have the same effect as just having the post deleted. Also the loss of one post in a discussion doesn't necessarily mean major loss of continuity to any given discussion. Furthermore, it seems that in reality there is a s small fraction of past discussions where continuity in reality would really matter.

It's not a stretch at all.  If we routinely mass-deleted posts, old threads would eventually become unreadable.  It's one of those things where, yeah, for a single user it's no biggie but if we did it on request it would quickly become a biggie.  So as a matter of policy we have to refuse because we definitely don't want to do it for everyone.

As i said ... i dont think deleteing posts is necessary (on the other hand, i could edit every post by myself) - but replacing the username with something like "guest" oder "deleted user (#0001)" and delete the account is from my point of view not a big deal.

but anyway ... thanks for all your feedback!
if you ever consider to change your opinion and start to delete account, dont froget mine

Bye

Good luck in your new endeavors!