When a user is anonymized, their mentions and quotes are modified to show the new username (anonymousXXXX).
I find it weird that when we delete a user account, the same process is not applied.
The user and all their posts are deleted, but their name remains in quotes, which could still identify them.
It would be more logical (and respectful of the user when the deletion is requested by them) for quoted usernames to be obfuscated as well.
Of course, admins can anonymize before deleting the account, but automating this step would make things simpler on their end.
I admit I find it strange that the subject hasn’t come up before, but the search and ask.discourse.org didn’t return any topic about this specifically.
But it also doesn’t leave the option to keep the name - and removing it will make the forum harder to read. So I don’t think that that is desired behavior.
If all of a user’s posts are deleted keeping their username when quoted in other posts wouldn’t necessarily make a forum any less difficult to read, would just mean new readers wouldn’t be able to tell who was being referenced other than random number set to anonymized user account.
This does seem like quoted username should be deleted as part of account deletion, maybe the default could just change that to “deleted user” or something unless account is anonymized to keep user posts? That would be more difficult to understand what people are talking about if all deleted account usernames are just changed to “deleted” instead of a number that is the same for all their posts / quoted username.
Right I think I understood what you meant, sorry my wording in response may have been confusing there. Made edit to change a statement to say less difficult instead of more is I think what I meant to write there.
Removing quoted usernames can deffinitley make a topic more difficult to understand, but if the posts authored by the user who has been deleted are also deleted that factor may be moot.
As in, a statement like “I disagree with that, joe,” won’t mean anything if Joe’s statements are deleted. “I disgree with that (deleted username) will alert readers that people are speaking to someone who’s posts are gone.
The proposal here is to obfuscate the username in discussions not delete the users posts entirely. I think this is a good idea and brings it in line with the anonymizing feature, which does obfuscate the username as explained in the op.
Yeah it makes things like this a bit harder to read, but how often do you have posts from multiple anonymized users and someone answers to them using a mention? Seems to be a rare occurrence.
Of course my example is very simplistic.
I think this happens on every forum that has more than one anonymized user.
I also appreciate to be able to “see” that a user posting something in one topic is the same user that is posting something different in another topic.
All I am saying is that I would like to avoid users to be anonymized automatically upon deletion, since it should only be done when necessary.
There is an alert that prevents user account from being deleted if they have posts, says posts must be deleted first before account can be deleted. Didn’t know if there was a way to bypass that somehow and delete account that still has posts, thought that was a requirement for posts to be deleted for account deletion.
This was mentioned in the first post, thought this feature request was just for if all user posts are deleted. In which case if their entire account is also deleted seems their username if mentioned by someone else with @ username would also be removed, but for some reason is not.
Anonymizing / obfuscating mentions is modifying text that other people (not the person asking for the account action) wrote. That doesn’t make it necessarily wrong, but it is definitely a different decision and shouldn’t be made automatically, without explicit consent and intent.
By way of example, whether it is appropriate might depend on the particular terms and conditions of an individual instance, and what license and/or ownership grant each end user makes for what they write in that Discourse instance. If the T’s and C’s for a particular instance do not grant to the administrator the right to arbitrarily modify the “content” authored by site visitors, then automatically obfuscating mentions may inadvertently exceed the administrator’s agreed scope of action.
Additionally, this is a long-running “expensive” action that may adversely affect performance on a system with a lot of text content to scan and change. It may be operationally contraindicated on at least some sites, irrespective of license concerns, with respect to normal operations.
There are a few things to consider with that, seems the process should be able to be customized by site admin depending on all the specific circumstances.
If someone is requesting full anonymization there are the gdpr policies, if the username is their actual full legal identifiable name then seems that would probably need to be removed if quoted by other user members especially on public site.
However even just that wouldn’t necessarily be enough to complete the anonymization process depending on what is being posted in text along with the username quote, ideally if that can be reviewed by site mod/admin to make sure there isn’t personally identifiable information in that also could be important.
I don’t understand the connection between your thoughts on anonymization when a user requests it and this feature request, which suggests that when a user is deleted, the user’s data should also be anonymized (optionally) so that, for example, quotes no longer contain the name.
On reflection I am finding this entire topic to be confusing to me. It’s not even possible to delete a member once they have begun participating in the forum. You can only anoynmize them.
In the odd case when a new member has been mentioned and wants mentions of their name to be removed, they can reach out to the moderators.
From my understanding, you cannot delete users with more than 5 posts and posts older than Delete user max post age.
is_staff? && # the user who wants to perform the deletion is staff and
(
user.first_post_created_at.nil? || # the user didn't create any post OR
!user.has_more_posts_than?(User::MAX_STAFF_DELETE_POST_COUNT) || # the user didn't create more than 5 posts OR
user.first_post_created_at > SiteSetting.delete_user_max_post_age.to_i.days.ago # the user didn't create a post older than defined by the setting
)
But you can temporarily (or even permanently) increase the Delete user max post age site setting to delete all the user’s posts using the button on their admin page. I don’t see a reason why you cannot delete the user after doing that.
I also remember a Discourse forum that was closed last year where deletion was offered before it was shut down. Many long-standing members appreciated this offer as they were angry with the company. It was pretty sad for those trying to save their posts of the past 20 years, because once a topic author was deleted, their replies were no longer available either.
Those aren’t neccesarily related, since user account could be deleted for any number of reasons. I was just talking about possible scenarios where a user may request either deletion or anonymization. There have been some topics about how users may be upset to discover admins aren’t actually required to fulfill account deletion requests, but there is the gdpr anonymization polices that govern European user accounts.
