Our community is based in the UK and 99.8% of our members are also in the UK so the GDPR subject is always an interesting one for us.
Our Terms of Service state that we will not delete your account, we will only ever anonymise it and that if you wish to have your account anonymised you should first delete any of your posts which contain your personal data, then request that we anonymise your account.
This largely places the onus back on the end user. It stops “rage quitting” in its tracks and keeps all of our topics in tact as we’ve yet to find anyone with a single post that contains their personal information.
We publish this in our ToS as:
If you wish to terminate this Agreement or your greyarro.ws account you may simply discontinue using the Website. If you wish to have your account anonymised and closed (thereby removing any personal data on your profile) you must request this by email. When anonymising and closing your account Grey Arrows will not delete any content you have submitted or any posts you have made. Any posts or content that contain your personal data must be deleted by you before you request your account to be anonymised and closed. You are unable to delete topics which have received replies. If you have started a topic and the first post contains personal data that you wish to be removed you must flag that topic for deletion.
This route also saves a mountain of leg work for our community admins/moderators.