How do you delete your account here?
- Thread starter toft
- Start date
They don't let you delete your account. The usual advice is either to ask for a voluntary ban, or deliberately scramble your password so you can't get back in.
You can't delete you account. You can stop posting. You can ask to be banned so you can't log in (You can choose how long it lasts).
Deleting an account would mess up the thread and post indices.
Every forum has a way to delete accounts. It's possible, just not often done except in the case of spam accounts.
But just because it's possible, don't assume it's not messy, especially if the deleted user created any threads.
But just because it's possible, don't assume it's not messy, especially if the deleted user created any threads.
So I've heard. I've also heard that's why a ban is preferred. But what I am not following is how deleting access to an account would make a mess of forums. Deleting an account means the account no longer exists. It doesn't mean all posts made from that account should be deleted. That would indeed be a somewhat Herculean task. (Besides reeking of censorship, but then, we're not a democracy.)
The reason I asked is that deleting an account has been known to happen. (I have this on very reliable authority.) So perhaps the question should be why deleting an account on CFC is such a problem.
The reason I asked is that deleting an account has been known to happen. (I have this on very reliable authority.) So perhaps the question should be why deleting an account on CFC is such a problem.
The vBulletin manual is freely available online for anyone to read, if they're curious about how these forums work. That said, every forum admin makes his/her own decisions about which features to enable, disable, or tweak.
Denying access to an account wouldn't mess up anything, because all that means is that the account's user is banned.
Okay, now I'm curious enough to do an experiment on one of my own forums. They're not vBulletin, but I'd still like to know what happens.
Denying access to an account wouldn't mess up anything, because all that means is that the account's user is banned.
Okay, now I'm curious enough to do an experiment on one of my own forums. They're not vBulletin, but I'd still like to know what happens.
Buster's Uncle
AC2 Owner
I'd point out that, short of being teh haxxor enough to rewrite the code, which I understand no one on staff here is except maybe TF, there's always things forum software just won't do, even at Admin level of access.
There's also always things it will do, but take someone burning a whole day or something to sort through posts to eliminate some undesirable side-effect, and therefore not worth fooling with short of life-or-death emergencies. -This sounds like one of those.
There's also always things it will do, but take someone burning a whole day or something to sort through posts to eliminate some undesirable side-effect, and therefore not worth fooling with short of life-or-death emergencies. -This sounds like one of those.
As I (little) understand it, rebuilding thread and post indices and the postcount tables is a resource intensive process. Slow forum for hours. The controls for that and a lot of other stuff are only available to "super admins".
I expect Thunderfall also has a half dozen or so other reasons for the policy I have no idea of.
Elsewhere I have seen the solution of making the account and its posts invisible to the membership. It wrecked most of the threads that the member had posted in. The 2nd posters in the threads now looked like a wackos who started a lot of disjointed nonsensical threads.
Your last paragraph is referring to the Global Ignore feature. That would render the posts invisible to everyone but staff, but they'd still actually be there and no slowdown would occur and it wouldn't be necessary to rebuild anything. I'm not sure if Global Ignore posts could still be made visible if "view post" were clicked, or if people could remove the member from their personal ignore lists if they wanted to. I seem to recall that if the ignored member's posts are quoted anywhere, the quoted material would still be visible. The vBulletin manual should have information about this.
It would, of course, mean that some conversations would look odd. You should see what happens to threads on XenForo forums when the ignore feature is used - sometimes it looks like one member talking to himself or shouting into the wind for half a dozen posts.
A post ago you were talking about simply 'deleting an account'. Which, basically, is what the question is. I don't see why deleting an account (not: all posts made from that account) mess up any forum in the first place. I'll try and rephrase: Why can't an account simply be deleted (meaning, said account holder has no longer access) without messing up entire forums? Frankly, it's beyond me. So it would be nice if someone could explain why this (for CFC) is such a problem.
Deleting an account means that the account is gone. Erased from existence. Everything associated with the account - posts, attachments, avatars, sigs, profile information - everything is simply no longer present. It's not like a permaban, which is what I think you're suggesting, where all the person's posts remain but the person can no longer access anything.
So if posts suddenly vanish, not only from viewing but also from the database, I can see that this would indeed cause problems. I'm not sure how the person's infraction record would be affected - if it would be gone as well, or if there would be a "ghost" record in the database.
My read of this situation is that a permaban would be the least-messy solution. The user would no longer have access to his profile or the ability to post, delete, or change anything.
Global Ignore is also a possible solution. But as Lefty says, it can lead to bizarre-looking threads where it seems like conversations are happening in a vacuum, with invisible people.
Deleting the account would mean deleting everything associated with the account. It wouldn't break the forum, but it would be a mess for the admins to clean up.
So if posts suddenly vanish, not only from viewing but also from the database, I can see that this would indeed cause problems. I'm not sure how the person's infraction record would be affected - if it would be gone as well, or if there would be a "ghost" record in the database.
My read of this situation is that a permaban would be the least-messy solution. The user would no longer have access to his profile or the ability to post, delete, or change anything.
Global Ignore is also a possible solution. But as Lefty says, it can lead to bizarre-looking threads where it seems like conversations are happening in a vacuum, with invisible people.
Deleting the account would mean deleting everything associated with the account. It wouldn't break the forum, but it would be a mess for the admins to clean up.
A member can effectively self perma-ban himself by putting an obs0lete/bad email address in their profile and resetting the password. If you want to delete personal information from your profile and posts, do that first.
OK, that makes sense. I now realized I was confusing delete account with blocking an account. Wouldn't that be an option? (So the account is blocked instead of all traces of the account removed, which obviously is quite a task.) Or is that not possible with CFC administrative mechanics?
Whether permabanning the user, the user scrambling his own login information to make it impossible to get back in, or applying Global Ignore, yes, it's well within vBulletin's capabilities to block an account from being accessed or seen.
Whether the admins would decide to do any of these is, of course, their decision.
Dale
Mohawk Games Developer
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2002
- Messages
- 7,828
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=274112
Delete user account mod for VBulletin. Posts made are retained as guest posts. No messing up of threads or posts.
Delete user account mod for VBulletin. Posts made are retained as guest posts. No messing up of threads or posts.
Interesting. However, in the comments it looks like it was developed for a later version of vBulletin than CFC uses.
