Advice: What do you do when a member asks to have their posts deleted?

Started by Veee, February 03, 2017, 03:06:17 PM

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Veee

Hello,

For as long as I've run forums I've never had this kind of thing happen to me. A member asked me to have their account deleted and posts. The issue here is that there are more than 30,000 posts made by that user.

I can't do that. It would mess with so many threads and so many important threads would be deleted. I can however either ban the user and change it's username or delete the account and leave the posts. Because by banning, the account is still listed in the stats page, for example.

What do you do when this happens to you or what would you do?
I think the user just doesn't want to be tracked to my forum. So I am not sure if I should delete the account or ban it (keeping posts in both cases).

Would it mess anything to leave posts without an user assigned to them?  ???

d3vcho

AFAIK, if you delete an user's account, their posts will remain there and the poster will be marked as "Guest" but with the same name. At least, this is the behaviour in 2.1, I cannot test this now on 2.0, but should be something similar, or maybe the same.

This is the result after deleting an account


And from my point of view, I won't delete any posts made by an user. A very good reason he has to suply me in order to convince me. I won't even delete his account.
"Greeting Death as an old friend, they departed this life as equals"

br360

Personally, I would change the user name to whatever you choose (let's say "removed account" for example), and then change their password and their email address as well. That way when you change the username, they won't get an email letting them know their username was changed.

Even if you were to delete their account and all posts associated with it, their username would still be searchable in any posts they were ever quoted in; so even if you did delete them entirely, they could still be traced through a search of their username.

I guess it also depends on the circumstances though. If them being traced to your forum would cause issues for them in their personal life for whatever reason, then in good conscience you could delete them and all of their posts. That really depends on the situation though.

I would also recommend creating a new thread on your forum with rules and guidelines about deleting accounts so people will know what happens if they do decide to be deleted (ie: if one requests to have their account deleted, you will honor that, but all posts they have made on your forum will remain)

Shambles

IMO, on a strictly legal point, it depends on the ownership of those posts.

If your rules specify that any and all posts become the property of the website owner, your want-away member has no recourse to demand their expunction.

The absence of such a stipulation may well confer ownership of the posts to the poster himself.

If it comes down to a dogfight, you may have a problem that requires legal arbitration.

vbgamer45

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JohnS

To a certain extent it depends where you are, if in Europe then anyone has the 'right to be forgotten' and you must remove any information that could identify the poster. User name and email are obvious to remove and this can easily be done, in theory you should also remove any IP addresses attributed to that user as well and you would have to comb 30,000 posts to see whether there is any identifying information in them.
It does not matter what terms and conditions you have, this 'right to be forgotten' law overrides them as it is a Human Rights issue.
There is then the internet archive, if your forum is open then it could have been archived, but he would then have to approach them, I do not consider that would be your responsibility.
In my view beware of making all posts the property of the board owner, that could raise liability issues which makes the board owner responsible for everything posted, much safer to have a disclaimer that any post is the property and opinion of the poster.
So you do not have to remove the posts, just anything that could identify the original poster.
Please note that this is just my personal opinion, I am not legally qualified so it should not be relied on.


Kindred

John,

it's only publicly identifiable information -- in this case, username and email)
IP address can (and should) stay - it is only visible to admins and might be critical for future tracking in the case of illegal activity.

As several have said, you can opt to delete the account, but leave the posts - and this is the correct process, IMO.
The user gave up sole rights to the content when they posted to a public forum.
removing posts from the middle of threads would adversely affect the forum and the flow of conversation
removing topics would also remove the posts of other members in those topics, without warning.

Do note: when deleted, with posts left behind, the system will display the user's LOGIN name, not the display name.
So, before deleting, either change the login name to something like deleted-user-# or do a global replace in the database after deletion.
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Looking

Veruskapt, what got them pissed enough to leave after all those posts?

Steve

Quote from: vbgamer45 on February 03, 2017, 04:15:46 PMDelete account don't delete posts.

+1 ... then follow the advice about changing the login name, etc.
DO NOT pm me for support!

JohnS

Kindred. I understand what you are saying and in most cases I agree that IP removal may not appear essential and an IP may or may not be considered personal information. I can only speak for UK regulations here where it is the retention of data that would enable a person to be identified. The courts have ruled that an IP can enable someone to be identified if together with any other information it builds a profile on a person and strictly therefore you should remove it from your database as leaving it would contravene Principle 5 of the act, though there is no fixed time period to remove it. The problem may only appear if the Forum was hacked at any time. The ICO is getting more strict, and are putting fines on people who do not adhere to the act.
I could be a tricky situation in the case of 30,000 posts to ensure there was no personal identifying information in them. Plus copyright on the post remains with the poster unless they have specifically assigned copyright to you, a clause in the your terms and conditions would probably not be enough to assign copyright. I have a clause in my terms and conditions I am happy to share if anyone wants it. Even the copyright lawyers agree that copyright of Forum posts is a vague and undefined area.
May 2018 may or may not bring changes.

Personally I would change the member_name, user_name, passwd and email_address and   Zap the  personal_text, birthdate, website_title, website_url, location, icq, aim, yim, msn columns for that user. In fact that could be a useful utility an 'Anonomize Account' function though it can all be done in the profile page.

It all depends on how careful you want to be and I do tend to be ultra cautious, something brought on by bad experiences in the past.

Kindred

John,  if you delete the user account, then the displayname, personal text, etc are all removed.

username and IP are stored in the MESSAGE record...  which is why you can delete the user without deleting the message.

So, there is no need to remove all of that other info.

As for copyright... while the original writer retains "ownership" --- by writing on a forum, the writer has granted the forum (owner) the right to the use of those words.

Also given that I suspect most admins would not know hwo to zero out the IP address (the only way to do it is through a direct db query) AND the deleted account holder has no way to confirm if it was done (since the IP address is not visible to anyone except admins), I think that they woould be hardpressed to make a court case out of it.
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Illori

Quote from: Kindred on February 04, 2017, 08:09:04 AM
(since the IP address is not visible to anyone except admins)

if the account is deleted then yes only the admin can see the ip address, but for registered members you can view your own ip address used to make a post in the bottom right hand corner of each post you made.

Dream of Omnimaga

From past experiences as admin and what I witnessed as regular user on various forums, 99% of the account+post deletion requests were done as part of a ragequit, often after the user had repeatedly broken the rules and ended up getting warned to stop. In many occasions, such request were done as an attempt to subdue the administration (to get the warning revoked or to make the admins feel bad) or to cry for attention. In other cases, it's a ragequit in response to being mad at another user.

As a result, I decline all post deletion requests, although I may delete or disable their accounts. I would only delete their posts if the user requested it via legal action (if there is any that can be taken in their country and the country where the forum is hosted), but even then it depends where the website is hosted and where the user lives. Sometimes the user will have calmed down by the time he receives a reply to his request anyway and will have changed his mind.

chrishicks

I had a situation like this a few years back. I used to allow a certain group the ability to delete posts and topics whenever they wanted. These were people who all followed from a previous forum where the admin started playing favorites to certain members and would just bash and mess with anyone who made comments about the favorites or the treatment others got. Fast forward a bit(a good 3 years or so) and I got tired of manually moving people over to this specific group so I ended up merging it with a normal group since people rarely deleted anything anyway. I figured they could just ask and I'd dump it for them.

Out of the blue one day I get a message from this member asking me to remove his account. There was no reason given and he wasn't any kind of trouble maker. He just left one day and then about 4-5 months later he came back and tried to delete all of his posts/topics without saying a word and that's when he noticed he no longer could. He had started a few thousand topics which had a good amount of posts in them so it would have been a blow to my already small forum. I tried to find out what was going on and explained that I really didn't want to wipe out a good chunk of the site without reason but he never answered and just vanished shortly after. To this day his posts and topics are on the site and I left his account alone on the off chance he may decide to return since he may have been having a bad day or something and wasn't thinking clearly or whatever the reason may be. If someone has a GOOD reason I would consider wiping their account or at least scrubbing it enough so they couldn't be identified or whatever the case may be but to just wipe out a chunk of a sites history for no reason I would not.

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