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Comments on Please allow a user to permanently delete their account
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Please allow a user to permanently delete their account
Please allow a user to permanently delete their account, without the current mechanic of writing an email to the support, writing another email for approval, etc.
Please just have a simple button to permanently delete the account.
Post
The current email path (and asking you to prove you control the account, because email can be spoofed) is a stopgap. We do want to allow you to delete an account more directly. If you could make the request from the site, for instance, then the fact that you're signed in would already demonstrate control of the account, so we could skip that confirmation step.
It's not quite as simple as "just delete the account on request", because we want to have some mitigation for abuses like serial spam/trolling. If you delete and immediately re-create an account, for instance, that's something we would want to be able to record, so that we can tie the activity of the two accounts together internally. We haven't built that tooling yet, or even worked out what exactly it should include, so currently account deletion includes somebody taking a quick look for suspicious activity first.
We want to give community members as much control as possible; it's part of our raison d'etre. We also want to protect communities from "easy" abuse, because supporting communities is also part of our raison d'etre. I'm sorry we don't yet have better tooling for the latter that would help the former, but we do aspire to get there. We're not trying to nanny or second-guess you; this is just the best we can do right now. It's not ideal and it doesn't scale.
Upodate (2022-12-28): we now have soft deletes, which mitigates the abuse concerns (the data is still in the database, just not shown). The remaining piece is a "delete profile" option for the user, which should probably send email with instructions for how to change your mind and maybe a time limit for doing so.
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