Closing Account

Trying to learn the rules here…
In the FAQ, it says that to close my account I should “turn off” email notifications. What the FAQ doesn’t specify is the circumstance where I want to get rid of the emails and still keep my account active. Does turning off the email spams render my account useless/inactive?

Turning off emails doesn’t close your account, you can still log in and post.

But if one were to want to never return, then if sending emails were to not be turned off they would still get emails.

Make sense?

That’s just so that you can walk away and never hear from the forums again. You can’t actually close an account per se.

Short answer - no. I have e-mail notifications turned off, and I’m still very much here.

That’s just so that you can walk away and never hear from the forums again. You can’t actually close an account per se.

Hopefully there’s some way, it’s sort of uncomfortable to have online accounts that physically can’t be closed.

Short answer - no. I have e-mail notifications turned off, and I’m still very much here.

I still have mine on because I haven’t developed the habit 100% of the time of checking in… when it becomes so routine that I never forget, I’ll probably remove my alerts too… the only thing they do now is remind me to come check on stuff

Closing an account would remove all of the posts made from that account rendering large sections of the forum meaningless. Might as well close down the whole forum completely as do that.

Just because an account is still open doesn’t mean that it is still in use.It just means that the posts made are still visible so that the threads they are in make sense.

Could the account not just be banned?

No, as banned in Discourse, deletes the account and blocks the IP/Email (and can only be done within a certain time period). However, we could suspend it indefinitely. It would prevent you from logging in but not delete any of the contributions you made.

I’m not familiar with Discourse other than through use here, so I can’t say what is a feature / isn’t / is in development, will throw that out as a caveat.

However, in most places that I’ve seen with discussions, they do one or more of the following
a) Remove posts when the person is removed, and probably replace them with (post hidden) or (post removed) or whatnot, and things suffer from continuity issues, but the user’s interactions are completely withdrawn.
b) Anonymize the posts when the person is removed, and they’re just posted by (Removed Account) or whatnot.

The idea that either of those solutions are the same as closing down the forum is definitely an exaggeration, I think. It’d hinder the historical accuracy of threads, though, for sure, especially in the long term, if the posts were completely removed. Probably less so in the actual usage day to day (it’s less than likely that a user assisting you will quit the forum while discussing your issue).

I’d definitely fall firmly on the side of the discussion that you should be able to do at least one of these, or another solution that hasn’t occurred to me. However, it’s easy for a community to include (and they may very well have in this one, I haven’t checked) stipulations in TOS regarding the fact that your content is no longer yours when posted, therefore there’s no “right to be forgotten” (Thanks for that term, European Google Users) here.

Luckily for me and my opinion, I don’t really plan on leaving soon and I don’t normally completely close accounts even when doing so in (whatever web app) so it’s less of a personal issue and more one of principle.

No, as banned in Discourse, deletes the account and blocks the IP/Email (and can only be done within a certain time period). However, we could suspend it indefinitely. It would prevent you from logging in but not delete any of the contributions you made.

@cpradio - from a security standpoint that would help. If the user who is leaving just dislikes leaving accounts accessible online (say he gets hacked, and never knows about it, but someone’s posting “as him”) then that’s a good solution, I think…

Edit 2: Sorry, I didn’t mean to jack this thread into a privacy debate or something, my bad

I’ve seen banned accounts on here make posts as “system”. Specifically posts that belonged to a certain ***************…grumpy fella. Anyway he’s banned and his posts are still here. I assumed that was banned. Suspended indefinitely works though.

That’s different. Those were imported, so they imported under system because we didn’t import banned accounts from vBulletin. That isn’t specifically Discourse related users/posts.

The censoring of the name makes that post sound more angry than it is now

It is forum policy to not discuss other member accounts publicly

A certain moderator censored it. He still has his name around Sitepoint though so Idon’t know why it got censored. Sitepoint articles have his name (that’s how I found it) and posts still has his name. Confused but I’m not a moderator and I submit to their will.
Edit-Wasn’t aware of that policy. Sorry.

I figured, I just meant it was funny because it now looks like he’s cursing

When the ownership isn’t transferred on posting there would still be a right granted to the site to display the content for as long as the site wishes to. No site would permit content to be posted where the poster could remove it again at any time, the TOS would always specify that posting content grants the right to continue using it for as long as desired…

The owner of a site would own all of the content of that site except where that content has been stolen from elsewhere or where the owner explicitly grants ownership to whoever provided the content (in which case they’d still have a right to use the content even though they don’t own it).

The person who wrote the content may still own the copyright but by posting it onto a given site they have granted that site permission to use that content. Even if you were supposed to be paid for the content doesn’t give you the right to have the content removed if you posted it and then they don’t pay.

Don’t be. We like lively discussions Privacy is big now-a-days, however, keep in mind, we advertise ourselves as a public forum, that alone shows there is no privacy to what you post. However, we respect the decision for someone to choose to not participate and to want their account “deactivated”.

We have no problems putting in measures to ensure your account can’t be logged into again (unless you find another means to contact us to have it reactivated – not sure how that would work, how we could verify you to your account, etc… that’s a problem to hash out should it ever arise)

No site would permit content to be posted where the poster could remove it again at any time, the TOS would always specify that posting content grants the right to continue using it for as long as desired…

You and I are going to disagree about your sweeping absolute statements in every thread we ever interact in, I think… you obviously can’t speak for the entire Internet, yes?

Even if you were supposed to be paid for the content doesn’t give you the right to have the content removed if you posted it and then they don’t pay.

If there was payment involved, some sort of terms were involved in the arrangement or contract that would probably be unique to that situation, ergo we have no way of knowing what those terms would be, ergo we have no way of knowing whether your statement is correct.
I’m assuming that the owners of most sites would stipulate things just as you’re indicating, or at least would not stipulate the author’s control. If it was me owning it, I’d definitely ensure users couldn’t remove things, I think, so I’d be with you there.

I’ll jump in here.

In the case of someone wanting to ‘close’ their account, I offer to change their username to something that won’t be associated with them (and to change all related contact info). That way we retain their posts for database integrity, but they aren’t left with an orphan account floating around the internet.

Since I started this confusing mess with a question… I just want to go on record to say that I did not want to “close my account.” I wanted to turn off the emails and was confused as to whether that would “turn off my account.” The husband had been using my computer and told me that my spam filter was broken (due to the emails from here.) So no harm, no foul, and hopefully all is good. I did find terms here that said my email address would not be sold or shared. I feel ok with that unless this forum is sold (as has happened with some other forums I used to subscribe to.) Perhaps I should have used an alias. Or perhaps I’m just paranoid.