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My Members Need to Delete Their Own Accounts
jasongeek
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I have members that need to be able to delete their own accounts. Is there a plugin or a way to do it? That way I won't need to manually delete members and answer emails about account deletions.
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Why do they need to delete their accounts?
Sounds like it is frequent thing you are facing.
@jasongeek: Totally understand you from a community managers perspective. We also have frequent requests and handle these manually.
@Kaspar: There are several cases where users request that. People who sign up and don‘t find the community to fit their needs like to remove their data or at least e-mail. On the other hand we have users who are angry because of ongoings in the community or too personal involvement so they want to get their account removed. Often it‘s of emotional value for the user but also GDPR rules are set to give users the ability to get their account data removed on request (and people seem to know that).
Community managers of large forums run into those requests several times a week and there is no „routine“ in place currently how to do that.
We remove images and replace the e-mail with our own trashmail adding hello+XYZ@myforum.net to clean the users data from our database. We do not remove discussions or posts unless there is sensitive information in them as this would crush the context of many discussions.
But we are about to create an addon to let users handle account removal that doesn‘t hurt the forums readability.
And I thought to myself: "That shouldn't be too hard..."
I will upload the plugin some time later, but you can already get it from here.
@phreak That plugin replaces every name with "[Deleted User]" but keeps the content.
I would never allow a user to remove content by himself. That should be done by a board admin. Removing content is quite difficult if the user already has deleted himself. Maybe some hint on that should be added to the delete section of my plugin "If you also want to remove the content (discussions & comments), please do not delete your user by yourself but ask a moderator to help you instead" - something like that...
@R_J: Always super productive. Although I would look for a function that remains the username intact. People do not necessarily have right to a pseudonym and from my experience a [Deleted Users] mark makes (A) users feel the community is less intact and (B) more and more people getting on the idea of getting deleted (which is of course their right) but will lead to more of (A).
From a community managers growth and moderations perspective keeping the usernames in place is relevant I think.
The plugin uses the inbuilt function which acts like that. I wanted to release it quickly: only a few days until my vacation will keep me from coding 😎
For GDPR reasons, I see this as a minimum requirement.
But I fully agree. I would even go beyond that and block user names that have been taken in the past.
Just did a quick test. Content created by a deleted user is linked to a real profile: /profile/[Deleted User]. My first idea was to simply change back the username but that would lead to links to profiles which then would show a frustrating "User not found." message
Maybe it is needed to change the userBuilder, userAnchor etc. functions from functions.render.php?
A plugin like that is not so trivial. I see the functions like that:
Anything else that cones to your mind @R_J ?
I have tried that plugin of mine and that is the result of the standard deletion process (which I would use because it fires an event "so applications can remove their associated user data"):
Name: [Deleted User] Password: 474C3232363959373359 HashMethod: Random Email: user_62@deleted.invalid Attributes: {"State":"Deleted","OriginalName":"Doomed","DeletedBy":62}Therefore the only open points after doing standard removal would be the following:
All E-Mail notifications are set to be OFF (we don‘t want to spam our own @myforum.com inboxes)
Username remains the same (to not confuse the community and keep mentions working)
„About me“ text gets cleared.
„Profile Extender“ information could be deleted as well (people add their city, birth date, etc. there if configured that way)
Uploaded Images get removed (optional ?)
Setting the name back is no problem at all but comes with other problems. More on that later.
Clearing additional Profile Extender fields is easy, but I wouldn't simply loop through all of them, because you never know why they are there.
Images are content and I wouldn't automatically delete any content. If the user requires so, okay, but there must be a legitimate reason behind it. Otherwise that might .
If the user name is restored, a link to the profile is shown which makes it impossible for other users to see than an account no longer exists. The problem with that is that they might want to mention such a deleted user and deleted users are excluded from the mentions list (which is good). That inconsistency is fugly.
If the profile of a deleted user can be visited, it might reveal info that wasn't meant to be revealed. Therefore there should be one standard "R.I.P. Username" page with a short explanation why the page is shown.
Users should be disallowed to re-register with that name, otherwise the links on old posts would link to the new users profile (Super-GAU!)
To overcome some of the problems described above, I would prefix/suffix restored usernames with an otherwise dis-allowed character. That way, a deleted "forumhero" would become "+ forumhero +" (yes, that should resemble a cross 😁).
An added benefit would be that you can do styling on that:
[href^="/profile/+"] { pointer-events: none; cursor: default; text-decoration: none; }Hi! I was install that plugin and had an error when i tried activate:
"Call to a member function getInfo() on null"
Hi, I had the same issue, just be sure that the name of the folder uploaded inside /plugins/ is <b>/rj-self-delete/</b> and not <b>/rj-self-delete-master/</b>
Hi, I had the same issue, just be sure that the name of the folder uploaded inside /plugins/ is
/rj-self-delete/and not/rj-self-delete-master/let the user change their email to some random one so personal info is no longer there.. Data should always stay and user should always stay! Rules of the forum if you post your data is no longer yours its ours. Unless you can give me a good reason to delete your posts or remove your name form them...
Make a button to create a random email address for them like 45245782jhg4j5hg2f3j4h5f2hg45fj23h4g5f23j4hg5@domain.com that they can never recover cause they wont know what it is so can never log in again but their posting history could remain intact. If the user ever wants to in the future can reach out to an admin to change the email on their account with real one again with proper proof they are who they say they are.