Best practices for deceased community members

Community
1

We had a member of our community pass away last week. Are there any communities that have best practices for working with this?

Some thoughts—

  • create a group called RIP or In Memoriam
  • have a message on their profile page

I’m wondering how other communities have dealt with this or if there are any features that might be useful.

Thanks

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2

I am sorry to hear you have lost a member of your community. My condolences! I think you are pretty much on the right track.

There is a procedure for this in the legal empowerment network community:

  1. change account status to tribute and change email address to community+username@foo.com
  2. As needed/appropriate:
    • Write tribute forum post and tag it #tribute
    • Update profile page with tribute bio, linking to tribute forum post
    • Update network champion for organization if appropriate
    • Draft and send out tribute via mailer (if core member or close partner)
    • Post replies to discourse post as appropriate

Step 1 is dependent on a wordpress user meta field used to keep track of members. Members can be active, dormant, tribute, or unreachable. community@foo.com is an email address for the helpdesk used in case later there is something going on with the account that needS attention.

Here’s an example: Profile - nomboniso - Grassroots Justice Network Community Discussions

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Sorry to hear that, Steve. Always a tough one for community managers.

Here are some things you could do:

  • If the platform allows, you can explore the option to ‘memorialize’ the profile with a suitable message.
  • If you can get in touch with the family (depending on the nature of the community), you could explore the option of giving them the user credentials to read & respond to messages in the memorial thread. This can be tricky because you want to ensure the right people have access. Trickier if the community member was using a work email for the community, in which case you might need the permission from their company.
  • Depending on the nature of the community, you can see if they can support the family in any way.
  • Lastly, if you have the access to a legal team, would be useful to get their advice and inputs on any initiatives you plan, especially around data privacy, security etc.

Again, most of this depends on the kind of community you’re running. I wrote a bit about this here: https://artplusmarketing.com/dealing-with-death-on-the-internet-f30ea8c735a3

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4

This is a tough one indeed. Thank you for the thoughtful topic, and the replies.

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5

Hi all,

today we received info that a long standing member of a forum I host has died.

Here’s what I’ve done so far - very similar to the previous posts:

  1. Create a ‘in memoriam’ group and add a flair to show on the deceased account.
  2. anonymise the user email address

what has been suggested by the community is to lock all the user’s posts so they can’t be edited by anyone except ‘admin’ to create a lasting record of their community input.

Does anyone know a way to permanently lock all posts by a user?

Thanks all,

Dave

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6

Locking the posts like that is likely not necessary and adds UI noise to every post - plus, edit histories are public and such edits can be rolled back if needed.

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7

Sadly, this topic has become relevant to me. I set the user’s title to “In Memoriam” and removed privileges and trust from the account to avoid it being a takeover target.

As an alternative to anonymizing the email address to make the purpose clearer, I still used the .invalid TLD to make the purpose clear and remove any email-based takeover vector. I don’t think I can do that from the UI (I might be mistaken) but succeeded in doing it from the Rail console:

u = User.find_by_username("deceasedUser")
UserEmail.where(user_id: u.id).each() do |e|
    e.email = "deceasedUser@in-memoriam.invalid"
    e.save!
end
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8

I am trying to determine the best way to set up accounts for deceased members.

I can set the accounts to a Trust Level 0. This removes most access, but does not limit several functionalities. How can I stop the following:

  1. Outbound emails being sent
  2. Receiving PMs

Any suggestions would be helpful.

9

The easiest way is probably to use the “deactivate account” button on the user’s admin page. This should also prevent emails from being sent, because it is as if the email address has not yet been verified

Screenshot_20250724_173415_Firefox
Screenshot_20250724_173415_Firefox1819×385 72.6 KB

Deactivated users are not suggested when you choose the recipient of a PM and the usercard says that the user is deactivated instead of offering a PM button

10

Thank you for your response. I looked into deactivating accounts. The downsides of using this approach are:

  • posts are removed from search results. This renders the deactivation approach as undesirable, as we have deceased members with over 5,000 posts.
  • possibility of inactive accounts being deleted by system automation.

I examined both deactivation and suspension of the accounts. Both have negative attributes.

11

Where did you find that information?

I have no problem searching for posts by the test user I deactivated.

12

Are you logged in as admin or as a base user?

13

As a test user without any moderator permissions

14

A member of my community passed away two years ago.

While he was definitely known for producing some outstanding work, the way a community lives and functions sometimes makes a user become inactive quite unnoticed.

At least publicly, no one asked for news (I was notified by a family member by email), and I didn’t take any specific action towards the account, nor set any kind of memorial feature, believing that if an announcement was to be made, it should come from the family, or with the family’s authorization. I asked them but never got any reply.

So the account remains untouched, even if it makes me sad that it seems just forgotten despite how precious they were for this community. :frowning:

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15

I also am not in favor of deactivating the user in this case because of the way the feature works currently. Deactivated users do stop showing up in search results, are not shown in the user list, and can’t be mentioned. This makes their posts really hard to find unless you remember some keywords!

An interesting feature request would be to make this an option when deactivating a user. In some (arguably most) cases you don’t want the user or their posts to be easily found, but in other cases (e.g. when an employee leaves a company) it’s not so desirable, in my opinion.

I see the advice I gave back in 2020 when I was community manager for Namati (and the now renamed Grassroots Justice Network) is still holding up there. I think it works quite well.

I think just changing the email address to one you are checking is fine. If somebody tries to write to the person, you can then respond to let them know they are deceased. You can also edit their user prefs to turn off the email notifications and email summary.

1 Like