MyBB Community Forums

Hello,
I run a large community and it just happens sometimes that users want to delete their account. Being a big forum, I am receiving deletion requests on a regular basis.
Sometimes, the same users get back and register a new account.
This, in my opinion, is a bit frustrating and time consuming. Both because I have to manually delete them (they can't delete their own account themselves) and merge the old posts to their new account if they register again. 
That's why I'm opening this topic to ask for a feature request that would really help in my case (and in many other large communities, I think). It's actually more than one request, but all related to user deletion.
1) there should be an option in the ACP to simply deactivate or "hide" user accounts without deleting them permanently from the database. 
2) there should be an option in the UCP to allow non-staff members to deactivate their account (deactivate, not delete). Administrators should be able to restore deactivated accounts in the ACP.
If possible, users should also be able to reactivate their account if they try to login in the forum using their nickname or try to register again with the same nickname and/or email address.
I really hope you will consider this for MyBB 2.0.
Thanks

I like this idea

Sounds good to me, basically like a "soft delete" rather than a hard delete. The option to delete the account should also be controllable by user group permissions too IMO.

the only issue I have with soft deleting a user is that it could wreck the flow of threads if they had a lot of posts. would it be possible to only block them from logging in, but keep their threads/posts active?

That is a problem, yes. I'm not sure if keeping the posts would be desirable either, but we could possibly not update the posts at all and instead hide them at render time if the user associated is soft deleted. I'm not sure, it's something we'll have to test and see what works best performance wise.

(2015-08-13, 07:56 PM)Euan T Wrote: [ -> ]That is a problem, yes. I'm not sure if keeping the posts would be desirable either, but we could possibly not update the posts at all and instead hide them at render time if the user associated is soft deleted. I'm not sure, it's something we'll have to test and see what works best performance wise.

it's a rather bizarre thing..a user will contact us asking to be deleted from the site (we don't delete accounts for the reasons specified earlier about the posts). we thought about changing the user's password and email address so they're simply not able to log in.

a soft delete feature would be nice if what is to be soft deleted is configurable. I guess we'll see once you do some testing.

We can anonymize posts while still keeping them assigned to an UID (not existent = anonymized, but administrators still will be able to revert this operation as the posts will be kept together by that UID).

I like the idea of having a soft delete option with the ability to choose whether or not posts get hidden. (And whom they get hidden from. Since you may want the posts to be only hidden from: guests, all non-staff members, select groups determined by group ID or everyone...)

Hard delete would be nice to see as a option for groups, but I'll admit that I'm not overly fond of hard delete in most cases.