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:
change account status to tribute and change email address to community+username@foo.com
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.
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.
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:
Create a ‘in memoriam’ group and add a flair to show on the deceased account.
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?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.