Members that want to be deleted

Should the admin of a board allow members to be deleted or not?

[dodoni]

What is the policy in your board when a member asks to be deleted?
Do you delete their account or not?

Is it legal to forbid members from being deleted or when someone asks so, the admin have the obligation to delete him?

And what about member's posts? Are they a property of the board since they are publiced in the board, or they are still a property of the author?

The situation in my board is that 2 members with some thousands of posts asked to be deleted, after a quarell they had in the forum and I m not sure what is the best decision in situations like this. A lot of threads they started will look like meaningless.

One of these members, said that the law gives him the right to be deleted anytime, whatever the board rules say.

Does anyone knows/have a similar situation in his board? And what was the solution?

[Rightz]

Sounds like a privacy issue. I've always thought that if a person wants you to delete his personal info from your database... ie name/email, you have to do it. But I'm certainly no expert. As for past messages I would have thought the moment they posted them in the public domain those post are public property and therefore do not need to be deleted.

Just look at this site for example - ww - it has posts from people whose membership are inactive or have expired.

[FourDegreez]

I usually initially ignore any request to delete accounts because 90% of the time people change their mind, although I've never had anyone say "it's the law" to me. I don't think I'd delete the posts, in any case. I'm not aware of any case in which a person can unilaterally override the clause in your terms that grants you unrestricted rights to display their posts (you do have such a clause, right), nor can I imagine anyone would actually hire a lawyer and take you to court over it.

[Automan Empire]

An important part of a forum TOS is ownership of the posts and right of republication etc. Here is what I wrote for my forum, it may give you a place to start. It has NOT been vetted by a lawyer I hereby disclaim.

4.Ownership Posts are considered the opinion of the poster, and are not necessarily endorsed or approved by <snip>. When posting on <snip>, you grant perpetual non-exclusive rights to <snip> to republish, in any form, the posted material.

One option that may help your current situation is to see if your forum software leaves up posts of deleted members. Some fora have the posts up still, but with the screen name replaced with guest. To me that is a reasonable accomodation of the departing member's request. If your software won't do that, maybe you could change the screen names to Guest1 and Guest2 etc.

I second that the parties are liable to return asking for their account and posts back! :)
-Automan

[webjourneyman]

You might consider just changing the user names of those two, and remove all personal info linked to them. That way the posts stay up but anonymously and the converstaion stays coherrent.

[vincevincevince]

I wonder what Brett would say?

[rogerd]

Usually deletion requests are privacy related. The problem can often be solved by editing a couple of indiscreet posts or by removing personal info from the member profile.

Member deletion is a tricky thing. vBulletin, for example, keeps the posts but converts them to "Guest". That's better than deleting the posts and leaving big holes in threads, but still might make the conversation confusing to a new reader.

[Marcia]

I've seen cases where the poster wanted a post deleted (or did it themselves - which imho shouldn't be possible by permissions, beyond a few minutes) because they didn't like the answers they got. Tough!

IMHO it isn't fair to other members to disrupt continuity and have their posts made useless or removed by the removal of posts by someone who changed their mind. Personally, I'd cancel their membership and delete their personal details, but would leave their posts intact.

[vincevincevince]

Instead of changing messages to 'Guest' - making up a new handle may improve continuity (?)

[rogerd]

Some user deletion requests can be avoided by cautioning new members NOT to use their real name for a screen name and to not post identifying info. Many deletion requests I get start with something like , "I just searched Google for my name and my posts from two years ago are at the top of the list."