# Best practices for deceased community members

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/best-practices-for-deceased-community-members/146210>\
**Category:** Community Building\
**Created:** [March 30, 2020, 11:16pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/best-practices-for-deceased-community-members/146210 "2020-03-30T23:16:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

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**Author:** ![mcdanlj](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mcdanlj/32/131829_2.png) [@mcdanlj](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mcdanlj)\
**Post date:** [May 21, 2021, 12:14am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/best-practices-for-deceased-community-members/146210/7 "2021-05-21T00:14:28Z")

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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:

```ruby
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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