Oh, interesting.
This is what I read that had made me think that, but I guess this looks to be in-line with anonymization which you say meets GDPR requirements:
Accounts cannot be deleted. You can stop using your account at any time. If you’re a paid member, you can cancel your membership to downgrade, at end of your billing cycle, to free subscriber. However, to protect the integrity of the site and the community, access logs are kept for our records, and comments are NOT deleted upon request. You are, however, free to update your profile information (altering or removing your bio, display name, etc).
(This is from a site I have no affiliation with, my own forum doesn’t have any members yet.)
I don’t agree with this statement necessarily that GDPR should be adopted world wide, although again I don’t know too much about that.
I’m in favor of people being able to have forum accounts deleted or anonymized if they request that, but anonymization of an account with a high number of posts may not be effective in concealing someone’s identity.
One way to go is to enforce a no personal information in forum post policy.
My company is U.S. based but I use mail servers in Switzerland and Germany so I’m not sure if that matters with the GDPR.
German mail company has this posted legal notice:
Switzerland:
From time to time, Proton may be legally compelled to disclose certain user information to Swiss authorities, as detailed in our Privacy Policy. This can happen if Swiss law is broken. As stated in our Privacy Policy, all emails, files and invites are encrypted and we have no means to decrypt them.
Under Article 271 of the Swiss Criminal Code, Proton may not transmit any data to foreign authorities directly, and we therefore reject all requests from foreign authorities. Swiss authorities may from time to time assist foreign authorities with requests, provided that they are valid under international legal assistance procedures and determined to be in compliance with Swiss law. In these cases, the standard of legality is again based on Swiss law. In general, Swiss authorities do not assist foreign authorities from countries with a history of human rights abuses.
I’ve noticed with discourse the ability for most posts to be deleted or edited seems to be permanent, at least with the default settings don’t know if there is a way to change that? A different kind of forum I’ve seen them change the settings to only allow posts to be edited for an hour before they are frozen.
Seems that there could be disputes if someone requests some posts to be deleted but a site administrator refuses. Those may have to be handled on a case by case basis depending on what countries are involved.
These are some impressive statistics from CERN, over 1,000 legal orders contested for both 2022 and 2021!