Requesting Account Deletion
The discussion revolves around the possibility of users deleting or requesting deletion/anonymization of their accounts on a self-hosted Discourse site. chriscant initiated the conversation, stating that users cannot easily delete their accounts. ondrej explained that users with one or fewer posts, created within three days, can delete their account through their preferences. However, this option is not available for users with more than one post.
chriscant suggested that the deletion process should be made easier, even for users with multiple posts. Currently, users can request deletion by emailing the site owners, listed on the /about page, as suggested by tobiaseigen. tobiaseigen emphasized the importance of site admins handling user deletion, especially for sites using Single Sign-On (SSO), to avoid mistakes and ensure users are deleted from all relevant systems.
codinghorror proposed adjusting the delete user self max post count site setting to allow users with more than one post to delete their accounts.
Hello. I’m running one self-hosted Discourse site and am setting up another. I can’t immediately see how a user can delete their account or request that it be deleted/anonymised. It would be good if that were straight forward. Is this possible? (Unsubscribing from mails is a different thing).
To keep things simple, we’ve disabled personal messages.
Thanks, Chris
So basically for a user to delete account: Three days or less old and you have 1 or less post. Said user must go into their preferences and scroll down to the bottom where there is a unmissable red button saying Delete my account.
If you have disabled messages then they can either make a unneeded public topic or message moderators (if they can do that?)
Users who want to cancel their accounts can reach out by email to the site owners via the address listed on the /about page. Yo can create a FAQ topic to explain this. Then the admin can remove or anonymize them.
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.
I have a test user created 16 hours ago with one post created where there’s no Delete my account button. We’re using SSO - would that explain why?
My recommendation would be that leaving would made easier even if you have posted. It’s very likely that some people will want to do this and it would be lovely if this were part of the package.
As it stands, we do list an admin email to request removal.
Thanks again, Chris
Hi Chris! Glad to help. In my experience, once people start posting it’s good that it’s site admins who delete users, especially for sites using SSO. Anonymized users can’t be reverted back again, and users make mistakes! This will allow you to sanity check the request and make sure the user gets deleted everywhere.
Try increasing the delete user self max post count site setting. It defaults to 1. I’m not sure why SSO would interfere with this; the only conditions are