How to handle users who want to delete their account?

CorneliaAskvall
CorneliaAskvall Vanilla Sprout
in Talk Community #1

Hi everyone,

I wanted to hear if anyone is willing to share how you handle requests from users who want to delete their community accounts?

The way we currently deal with this, is by having users comment in a specific discussion letting us know they want their account deleted. Then one of our community managers or moderators go in and manually delete the account. This is working okay, but it requires a bit of manual work for us + can sometimes lead to issues when a user changes their mind or wants their account deleted quickly.

Ideally, it would be nice if users had the option to delete their own account - but I'm curious to hear if anyone else has a better solution for this?

Comments

  • Shauna
    Shauna HLV Staff
    #2

    Hey @CorneliaAskvall - historically the reason that we haven't allowed self delete is the delete method question - if a user is deleted (by mod or hypothetical self delete) and they have discussions that have comments (or in the near future, comments with replies), how do we handle it?

    This can be handled in a few ways:

    • delete their content entirely and all replies (this can be less than ideal for the users that replied, especially if they put a lot of thought and effort into their replies, or on threads that have tons of comments/replies)
    • delete their content and leave 'tombstones' something like [deleted content], replies stay but might not make sense without the full context
    • delete their username, but keep their content - this avoids the above 2 scenarios, but some users might want to have their content fully wiped

    This is also why we've never added it as a self serve option.

    For some communities, this needs to be handled manually so a moderator can look at the impact of the deletion, particularly in the first two contexts - I've seen some communities change the author and/or manually wipe the content on threads that have tons of comments pre deletion of the user to preserve certain threads, but I think this is an edgecase for when a once super user decides to leave.

    I've also seen some teams that work with their main site seam to create a 'delete me everywhere' scenario that leverages the vanilla APIs to delete a user on community when they request it on the mainsite.

    Personally, I would maybe use the CMD and create a category that is pre moderated so that a report in the CMD comes through when someone makes a request like this that can be assigned to a moderator for quick action and internal discussion.

    Curious how others in the community are doing this!

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