Best practices for deceased community members

社区
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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3

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

我正在尝试确定为已故会员设置账户的最佳方式。

我可以将账户设置为信任级别 0。这会移除大部分访问权限，但并未限制几项功能。我该如何阻止以下操作：

  1. 发送出站电子邮件
  2. 接收私人消息

任何建议都将有所帮助。

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9

最简单的方法可能是使用用户管理页面上的“停用帐户”按钮。这也会阻止电子邮件的发送，因为这就像电子邮件地址尚未验证一样。

Screenshot_20250724_173415_Firefox
Screenshot_20250724_173415_Firefox1819×385 72.6 KB

停用用户后，在选择私人消息收件人时不会出现该用户，并且用户卡会显示用户已被停用，而不是提供私人消息按钮。

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10

感谢您的回复。我研究了停用账户。使用此方法存在以下缺点：

  • 帖子将从搜索结果中移除。这使得停用方法变得不可取，因为我们有已故会员拥有超过 5,000 篇帖子。
  • 系统自动化有可能删除不活跃账户。

我研究了账户的停用和暂停。两者都有负面属性。

11

你在哪里找到的信息？

我搜索已停用测试用户的帖子没有问题。

12

您是以管理员还是普通用户身份登录的？

13

作为一个没有任何版主权限的测试用户

14

我的社区的一位成员于两年前去世。

虽然他无疑以创作一些杰出作品而闻名，但社区的生活和运作方式有时会让用户在不被注意的情况下变得不活跃。

至少公开地，没有人询问近况（我通过电子邮件收到一位家人的通知），我也没有对该账户采取任何具体行动，也没有设置任何形式的纪念功能，因为我相信如果要做公告，应该由家人发布，或在获得家人授权后发布。我曾询问他们，但从未收到任何回复。

所以这个账户仍然原封不动，尽管它让我感到难过，因为它似乎被遗忘了，尽管它对这个社区来说是多么珍贵。:frowning:

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15

我也不赞成在这种情况下停用用户，因为该功能目前的运作方式。停用的用户将不再显示在搜索结果中，也不会显示在用户列表中，并且无法被提及。这使得他们的帖子非常难以找到，除非你还记得一些关键词！

一个有趣的功能请求是，在停用用户时将其设为一项选项。在某些（可以说大多数）情况下，您不希望用户或其帖子轻易被找到，但在其他情况下（例如，当员工离开公司时），我认为这并非如此理想。

我看到我在 2020 年（当时是 Namati 和现已更名的 Grassroots Justice Network 的社区经理）给出的建议（此处）在那里仍然有效。我认为它效果很好。

我认为只需将电子邮件地址更改为您正在检查的地址即可。如果有人试图写信给该人，您可以回复告知他们已故。您还可以编辑他们的用户偏好设置以关闭电子邮件通知和电子邮件摘要。

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