Enable easy deletion of the entire account by the user himself

The way category moderators are set-up, is not intended to have global permissions to remove forums accounts (which will affect other categories), also it’s not technically possible without making people global moderators (and we have +120 category mods at the moment).

What’s the problem you are trying to solve here? Admins have already processed requests for forum account deletions and also performed deletions to spam accounts.

Complains coming from some users were around not deleting their account right away, and instead being deleted on Monday morning when an admin was online. @forums-governance is discussing how to be able to have better admin response to urgent issues (maybe more admins in different timezones), but in my opinion an account deletion request can perfectly wait until Monday morning if needed.

Cheers.

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I am pretty sure that it is quite extreme interpretation, account deletion happens here far faster than typical/average on other websites.

I agree and will comment there after some more research.

I just wanted to respond to the users and find a solution, which had complained about it here recently. Originally I didn’t want to make it as big as it is now, but I’m wondering myself that the software here is probably not able to delete the own account by means of a few clicks.
From a technical point of view, this shouldn’t be a problem, so I’m trying to figure out why this isn’t possible in Discourse. Maybe there are really good reasons for this, but I don’t see them yet.

To get the thread back here: yes I agree in principle. But to make the platform more user-friendly and to learn from what happened, the plugin linked at the very beginning could possibly help to clarify the process that runs in the background. If I as a user am informed in written form that the deletion of my account will take at least X days, then I can do more with it than if I get no feedback at all and after X hours the account is still there.

I agree with this as well. Nevertheless, I think it would help a lot if there was a short informative description about the timing and process.

Thanks for all the comments and thoughts. I appreciate it very much.

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Based on my current understanding from the follow-up discussion in the Discourse forum, I would currently suggest the introduction of the Deletion Request plugin as preferred.

From my perspective, this would be a first step, regardless of what else Discourse offers in the future.

How does the rest see it?

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We would have to make sure that there are no technical issues with the plugin and that it does not impose a significant maintenance burden.

But the functionality the plugin offers seems desirable, so ignoring the caveat above for a moment, I would personally be in favor of installing it.

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In the opinion of the data protection authority, the removal of the personal reference (“anonymisation”) of the personal data can in principle be a possible means for erasure according Article 4 number 2 in conjunction with Art. 17 (1) GDPR. This means that the data doesn’t need to be destructed.

In my current example, by deleting my OSM account, the forum user still remains without change. I still have the tab open and could continue to write here with the actual deleted OSM user. According to the law, the user account does not have to be completely deleted, but at least anonymized, which it currently is not.
See posting here, the original name is still visible: Enable easy deletion of the entire account by the user himself - #11 by osmtestfordiscourse2

But I like to go one step further here. We’ve already had the request from several users that they wanted to delete their account “quickly and easily”.

The user story would be: As a Discourse user, I want to delete my account quickly and easily and get immediate positive feedback for that action.

The question remains: What are the arguments against adding a button that does just that, even if it’s not legally necessary.

Users can also report, like, bookmark, share posts here. Even though it’s not legally required. So there is also functionality here that makes it easier for a user to use the software, even though this is not required by law. So why not also delete your own account via button?

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  1. button will not add itself, someone needs to write this code (and there is also opportunity cost)

  2. very easy account deletion makes easer to cause larger damage by someone hijacking account (or leaving it logged in by accident somewhere)

In general there is weird mishmash of “it is legally required” claims that are for large part inaccurate.

“It is legally required” is a poor strategy to demand features that are, in fact, not legally required. It just irritates people.

Note that the reality is that you have two accounts in two places, one for the OSM site and one for the forums, a deletion request in one of them is not creating a request on the other one.

About the plugin, as @Tordanik said, we’ll discuss in our next @forums-governance meeting and see if there are any technical issues to have it installed.

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Update from Discourse: They will not implement a delete function. Therefore, the plugin would probably still be a more user-friendly option.

See: Add Account Deletion - #19 by riking - feature - Discourse Meta

To be fair, the Discourse developers haven’t “refused to implement a delete function”, but rather said what would need to happen (for reasons including GDPR) in such a case. Their full reply (which you linked to) makes some very good points, including that only the admins understand the SSO links involved in any implementation and any request therefore needs to be handled by actual admins, not a local-only automatic deletion.

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@SomeoneElse Thanks for the clarification.