I just noticed that on the user profile page, the "All Communities" tab lists all communities where there is a profile, including deleted profiles. If a non-moderator follows a link to a deleted profile it's not a 404; we have a "this user is deleted" page. Most of the time we don't link to deleted users, so it's hard for most people to even encounter that page. But it's there; someone thought ahead.

Well, it was hard for most people to encounter a link to a deleted profile, but then I failed to consider that case when implementing this new tab on the profile. What should we do with deleted profiles on that page?

1. Leave it alone; there's no server error here and it's ok to show every community where a profile has existed, even if it doesn't now.

2. Exclude deleted profiles; users should be allowed to be forgotten.

3. Exclude deleted profiles for most people, but show them (marked as deleted) to (moderators? curators?) in case it helps evaluate cross-community situations, and/or for transparency.

4. Something else?

I'm anticipating that someone will suggest 2a: exclude them from the list for self-deletions but not for forced deletions (like spammers). We can't do that today; the software does not distinguish those two cases. Eventually we will have self-serve profile deletion and we could then handle that case differently, but right now deletions are done by mods/admins pushing buttons, which might be in response to support tickets or might be because of the user's behavior.

posted about 22 hours ago

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Monica Cellio‭ staff

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