Hey all,
I’ve had a search around and haven’t found anything to cover this. Is there (or can there be) a way to automatically anonymise users who haven’t logged in for a certain amount of time?
It seems that after - say - four years there’s no good reason to still hold onto a user’s personal data.
But feel free to disagree!
There is not currently any way to do this, so it would be a feature request. There is a lot of discussion on meta about anonymising users upon request, but I don’t think there has been anything about automating it.
Some reasons I can think of:
Reading old discussions without the context of names/avatars can be very confusing
The user may return, and want to re-claim their account. This could be especially true on support communities, where users only visit when they have a problem.
I highly recommend not mass anonymizing users, that is a rather “boil the sea” approach to this problem.
We do have a plugin that I can recommend which deactivates users when they haven’t been seen for a long time. This effectively means the account is turned off until such time as they re-validate their email account:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse-auto-deactivate
This is completely safe and arguably close to being possibly recommendable as a default built in Discourse feature, because it would make old accounts less vulnerable to takeover or exploit …