I think if you have a website where users submit their own content, there are countries where they have to be able to delete whatever content they post. Again, I'm not going to say this is the de facto truth because I don't have the legal insight to do so.
then you go delete it yourself. why do i need to spend the time deleting all your posts, submissions, blogs, images, threads, etc? then you can edit your own account to change your email address to
[email protected] and uncheck all the allow contact options and dont accept PMs from anyone. problem solved and I dont need to waste my time dealing with your personal baggage.
(2012-12-28, 11:33 PM)pavemen Wrote: [ -> ]then you go delete it yourself. why do i need to spend the time deleting all your posts, submissions, blogs, images, threads, etc? then you can edit your own account to change your email address to [email protected] and uncheck all the allow contact options and dont accept PMs from anyone. problem solved and I dont need to waste my time dealing with your personal baggage.
Or you could just offer a delete function to your users. As the MyBB Security plugin shows, this is pretty trivial to do. If this hostile attitude is how you feel about your users, it would be advisable to never join any of your websites.
Quote:If this hostile attitude is how you feel about your users, it would be advisable to never join any of your websites.
It's his attitude about users who want to leave. At that point they stop being a user anyways.
It's like when I ban members on my sites then they beg to come back or open a new account. They're banned for a reason.
When someone tells you to screw off or vice-versa I don't see a reason to fulfill their requests. The good-natured relationship has ended at that point.
The problem lies at the fact every country has its own rules. US of course never wants you to delete any data god forbit they could not track somebody down so. But their are countries were you simply have to offer the functionality to remove user information. On the other side its true more and more countries are slowly starting to come with laws that would force sites to store data. Even though i am not sure if this ever will apply to small sites. Or only to giants like facebook, twitter and google.
For the rest the idea of a deletion function should be there there are plenty of reasons to be thought of why a user could in a case want to delete their account. And they simply should have that right. Most extreme cases would be stalking. And what is the problem pavemen of having such a small feature. I mean if you lose a member that is not active anymore anyways the only thing a site gains from that person is a silly + 1 on the member count.
Besides a feature like this is not used all that often i would imagine. Since most people do not care about their own privacy. So the cases that do want this generally have a solid reason for why they would like the option to be there.
Quote:When someone tells you to screw off or vice-versa I don't see a reason to fulfill their requests. The good-natured relationship has ended at that point.
Thats not true, as long as a user has an account on your site its your user. And your responsibility, he/she is no longer a user when his/her account is removed. Just moving it to a sepperate group for a higher member count/post/thread count is silly if you ask me.
Yes a good reason in my opinion should be needed. But the complete refusal to remove a member is silly.
Edit:
One last thing to note about this though is, if you change the TOS you are in certain countries simply required to tell users what is changing. And if they decline these new terms of service a site administrator is simply forced to remove the account.
I don't see a user wanting to leave my site as hostile. It's petty to see it that way. In addition, just because you've banned a user doesn't mean you're no longer responsible for their data. It's still under your stewardship.
(2012-12-28, 07:58 PM)The Elite Wrote: [ -> ]Philly I think has merged like 300k-350k (IIRC) posts into his forum, I think 60-70% of his posts and members are merged (no offence).
Again you're wrong. I have been there since FK had 200K Posts. Only Crayo's Cyber Tech Forum & Alternate's Uzi Gaming was merged. And both these Forum had 35k posts in total.
(2012-12-28, 11:03 PM)Fábio Maia Wrote: [ -> ] (2012-12-28, 10:21 PM)labrocca Wrote: [ -> ]One thing I think would be a nice option is a "close account" feature allowing the simple removal of private data like email and password but I've never seen a plugin for it and MyBB doesn't make that simple.
http://www.mybbsecurity.net/topic-delete-account
I was just about to post that ^_^
(2012-12-28, 11:48 PM)anori Wrote: [ -> ]For the rest the idea of a deletion function should be there there are plenty of reasons to be thought of why a user could in a case want to delete their account. And they simply should have that right. Most extreme cases would be stalking. And what is the problem pavemen of having such a small feature. I mean if you lose a member that is not active anymore anyways the only thing a site gains from that person is a silly + 1 on the member count.
<snip>
Edit:
One last thing to note about this though is, if you change the TOS you are in certain countries simply required to tell users what is changing. And if they decline these new terms of service a site administrator is simply forced to remove the account.
I am not stopping anyone from going and purging their own data and then
once they change their email address the account is no longer associated with them. If they chose to post personal information into the public domain, that is not my problem. Both my TOS and Privacy Policy state to not post private details anywhere, not do we cater to children (COPPA).
But I am not going to go out of my way to purge an account that may throw all kinds of threads and posts out of whack with missing content and context, have to worry about finding quoted content, etc.
My TOS gives me perpetual royalty free yadda yadda permission to use and retain the content you post. Not stopping you from cleaning up your own mess though.
Regarding the second point, I am not in one of those countries. If it was that big of a deal however, don't you think it would have been an issue longer ago than the EU Cookie law that made such a fuss. I would think that the feature request to allow users to delete their account would have come up if it was such an issue. However, I do announce TOS and Privacy Policy changes though I do not outline the specific changes most of the time. You were able to read it and agree to it the first time, you should be able to do it again.
@Brad: Do you really think that post of mine indicated hostility towards users on my part? I love my users and I hate to see them leave, but my sites are a public forum which you are under no duress from me to publish your content into the public domain, thus why is it my responsibility to remove it?
It may not be important in your niche, but in mine, if a user is purged, it could cause many threads they started to be removed that could remove months or even years of accumulated content that is significant to the rest of the community, much of which was not originally posted by the person being purged.
Technical content (which my big board contains) is difficult to replace. It may not matter in your niche if an entire well-aged thread is removed, but it matters in mine.
It would definitely disrupt a lot of conversations on my site if a user were to delete their posts. But they can
already do this by either deleting the post or editing its contents. It doesn't matter whether or not its good for me – they wrote it, and they should have the right to remove it if they want to in the future. It's not my call. They're not under duress from you to publish their content, but they are apparently under duress from you to keep it there once they do.
I could write in a license that allows me to do whatever I want with their content once they submit it, but I think that's pretty scummy. This is my policy on user generated content:
Quote:By posting content on this site you give us permission to share and reuse the content in any way we see fit, e.g. posting your Haralook on our Tumblr our sharing a post you make on Facebook. When we do this, we will attribute the content to you. We do not make any claim of ownership of your content, and we will only use it within the Harajuju umbrella of content and websites.
Legally you can put whatever you want in your TOS, I guess, and I'm not challenging your legal right to do so – I'm asking if it's ethical.
Glad someone provided a plugin to delete an account, but I wonder what happens to threads that user started ... ideally, the thread would still exist, just attributed to the next poster in line.