Delete or Disable account?

[jhaze]

To my wonderful Lithium Community!

A user in our community reached out and asked:

"Please delete my J-Net account associated with this e-mail: ***"

This being my first time having to deal with this, I wanted to reach out to you all for some assistance. According to a suuuuper old post back in 2013, Claudius (Honored Contributor) wrote: "There's no feature built into Lithium that allows a user to delete their own account. A community user account can be disabled by a Moderator / Community Manager though which would practically disallow access to using the community account any further."

I'm assuming this is still the process correct? And to be clear, a Moderator/Community Manager can DISABLE an account, but cannot DELETE an account?

Thanks in advance.

[JasonHill · Accepted solution]

Things have moved on since then @jhaze, particularly with the arrival of GDPR.

Admins can close accounts - https://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Default-user-profiles/Close-community-member-accounts-Admin-only/...

And most communities now allow users to close their accounts too - https://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Default-user-profiles/Enable-community-members-to-close-their-own...

And yes, the key here is to remove any publicly identifiable information and disable the account, but not remove other content which would damage the integrity of the forum.

Let us know if you have any trouble.

Jason

[AbhishekIlindra]

Hi @jhaze:

As @JasonHill mentioned Admin and End user can able to delete the Accounts  by based on the option Enabled.

As per my knowledge lithium will take 10 Days to anonymize the user Data

If my post is helpful and answers your question, please give "Kudos" and "Accept it as a Solution."

Thanks & Regards,
Abhishek Illindra User Data.

[Finney0225]

Hii wanted to ask on this thread -- so if you close an account, is the email address still in khoros backend? like say a user wanted their account to be deleted and then reinstated a few months later - would i get the error when creating an user that the email address is already taken? thank you! 

[JaneW]

Hi @Finney0225 

If you delete a user, once the 'soft delete' window has expired (default is 10 days) you will not receive an error, however, neither can you 're-open' that account.

Hope that answers your question 🙂

[Finney0225]

Yes! Thank you, @JaneW. I had an error with one of my test accounts, so was gonna delete and then create a new one with that same error in a few weeks, so just wanted to make sure! Thank you again 🙂