I registered on a discussion forum many years ago and now no longer involved in that particular industry. The forum requires all registrant to use their real name on the forum.
Well, now I want to get my username changed or deleted as I don’t want it to appear on the search engines. After several attempts through PM and e-mails, the admin is ignoring all the request.
If the admin is not willing to delete the account, it is fine with me. But I really want them to change the username to a fictional name for my privacy reasons.
Is there a law that protects members for such situations? Hope to hear from you, thanks.
i dont think you could do that. most forum software i know of doesnt have the username change feature offered as part of the member control panel.
forum owners doesnt wanna change username because they loose serp traffic for indexed profile page, if any. plus it could cause more requests to change username from other members, thats a chaos and unnecessary work to come in future.
your only chance is to explain your situation to the admin and hope they would help you.
IMO, any forum membership that requires you use your real name as a username should also have a very strict privacy policy that includes the ability to remove all traces of your name from the database, upon request.
I have no idea what kind of privacy and data protection laws you have in the US, but my first port of call would be the web site’s privacy policy to see what it says about how it uses your personal info.
Basically if the forum admin is ignoring, try the contact details from the whois for their domain. You should get email, street address and maybe even a phone number. If you get no answer, then you could try their host. However, I really don’t know what the legal situation is in these matters, maybe your local citizen’s advice centre could advise?
I would suggest the best option is to update your profile page stating that you are no longer involved in the industry, but to contact you for xx or yy services at your new homepage (assuming you have one). If you can’t get the links removed, you can at least harness them for your own use.
Locked your account? Sounds like you perhaps rubbed the owner up the wrong way - did you have a barney?
To be fair, looking at the forum, it doesn’t really seem that big a deal, it’s just a DV forum. What’s the actual issue with your name being there, did you say something on the forum you’d rather not have public?
An issue would also be that if anyone quoted your post, I think your name will appear in the quote, even if they change your user name.
Anyway, you’ll probably just have to accept it, I doubt there’s much you can really do about this, not when you chose to use your real name.
As a forum owner I have on occasion received requests to delete user accounts and all their posts. We generally refuse those requests because it disrupts the flow of threads. However, we do always offer to remove any personal info, any individual posts they identify and to change their username. It seems the only fair thing to do.
I see that they have a Twitter account, you could ask them about the name change there? The fact that it’s public might encourage them to reply. If that doesn’t work, try contacting their host and ask that your personal information be removed from their servers.
