How to deal with members who want to be deleted.

[Grumpy]

I think everyone gets this problem at some point on their board. A member is banned, or gets warned and doesn't like it, and starts throwing all kinds of threats at you, things like they will prosecute you unless you remove their account and posts.

Don't listen to them.

I'm here to tell you that. According to basic terms and conditions which are there by default in phpBB, MyBB, IPB and vBulletin, anything posted on your forums is solely your property. This means if a user posts something on your forum which belongs to them, they are also allowing you legal permissions to use it and redistribute it. That is there by law and unless you remove it from your T&C, will always protect you.

Next time you get a member asking for their posts and account to be deleted, cite the following to them: "Under the copyright act of 1990, any article, post, or image you use on this board is respectively our property, you cannot prosecute us to get us to remove the content. Although it is indeed copyrighted to yourself, when you posted it on the board you gave us, (Forum name), full permission to use it with or without your consent."

Then they either feed that to their lawyer, who confirms that it's right and closes the case, or they give up. Most of the time you just have to say that and then they'll stop harassing you. It's easy enough.  Don't fall for their silly tricks and long phrases and words which you might not understand, and don't feel intimidated by them - You're the person who's in the right!

[Arantor]

According to basic terms and conditions which are there by default in phpBB, MyBB, IPB and vBulletin, anything posted on your forums is solely your property. This means if a user posts something on your forum which belongs to them, they are also allowing you legal permissions to use it and redistribute it. That is there by law and unless you remove it from your T&C, will always protect you.

I see you're arguing with the Copyright Act of 1990, which is solely a UK matter, which means if there's anything outside the UK in it, it's... debatable.

The fact is, regardless of what that 'registration agreement' says, you're granting them a licence to use it, not legal control over it, and unless you actually sign a document granting them rights to it, you still hold legal copyright, more than enough to demand your content be removed if you so wish, with the argument that you are revoking their licence to your copyrighted material (since no 'irrevocable licence' has been granted, and that would require a signature)

You cannot claim it as your property since you have no ownership of copyright, you have at best a non exclusive redistribution licence, and I suspect that if it actually went to court, the default wording in the licence agreements wouldn't actually stand up, regardless of what the Copyright Act of 1990 says (especially since I think you'll find it's been superseded since then with the 2006 amendments)

Also, don't think of trying that trick if you're not based in the UK, because you will get likely get reamed if you try it.

[Dandello]

While the nuances of the legality of a poster granting non-exclusive and perpetual publication rights to a forum may be nebulous, most of the time if you have language to that effect in your TOS, they'll back down since what they usually really want is to trash the forum and put you, the admin, on the defensive.

As for members who want to be deleted - I no long longer allow it - but I WILL put their account in a 'closed' group so they can't rejoin using the same info. It also means I can tag their posts if I need to later on (YaBB's delete member posts doesn't have a 'delete all by poster function'.)

[Shawn Gossman]

Its in my rules that we don't delete accounts and by joining, you automatically agree to my rules and to be bound by them. However, if they will not give up over the account delete, I will change the account name as well as issue a life time ban, that is how I feel about that.

Fair?

[Arantor]

Interestingly, there was an investigation by one of the EU commissions into account deletion (note that account deletion is not the same as removing all the content posted by that account) and they took the view that account deletion may be a required facility upon request, and it's partly why Facebook had to introduce it (properly), because in FB's case, it was potentially a matter of privacy. Given how much personal matter could be posted on a forum, it certainly provides a sort of precedent.

[Dandello]

Interesting - but it doesn't mean that the user needs to have the right to do it, only that a means to null out the account profile information must be available to an admin and due diligence be taken to protect privacy (but due diligence should be taken to protect the privacy of ALL members in any case).

So, if Guinea Pig demands to be removed, flagging the account as closed, removing identifying information - such as contact info, gender, whatever answers they may have given in response to profile questions - should be a matter of course. (Of course, if Guinea Pig is an obnoxious twit/troll, her real email, IP, and account name will go in the banned list if it isn't already.)

[dojo]

They can have their account edited so that they are not connected to the forums anymore. Their posts STAY, so does their account, just that it has some 'generic' name and contact details and it's BANNED. They cannot return into the forums anymore, but I surely don't delete content or accounts.

[themanikin]

this is pretty useful info will certainly help with the riff raff when they go insane. i had one threaten to get my whole site shut down in the past

[ThisOldMan]

Interestingly, there was an investigation by one of the EU commissions into account deletion (note that account deletion is not the same as removing all the content posted by that account) and they took the view that account deletion may be a required facility upon request, and it's partly why Facebook had to introduce it (properly), because in FB's case, it was potentially a matter of privacy. Given how much personal matter could be posted on a forum, it certainly provides a sort of precedent.

I did read somewhere that it's possible, theoretically, to remove all the data that had been put in a Facebook account. Said deletion being done by the Facebook account owner. However I am not too confident that this will actually work. What do you think?

[Atlaerom]

As for members who want to be deleted - I no long longer allow it - but I WILL put their account in a 'closed' group so they can't rejoin using the same info. It also means I can tag their posts if I need to later on (YaBB's delete member posts doesn't have a 'delete all by poster function'.)

This exactly. On my old forum I used to have a group 'Former Members' that I would allow people to defer their accounts to when they felt like they needed to leave the forums permanently. I would also offer to change their names and delete all of the details in the profiles. But that was as far as I would go.

It took an e-mail to get your account back...Very few didn't wind up doing that.

[trentz]

This situation happened in my forum a year ago. I almost fall for it when a user wants his posts deleted. He posted a thread saying they will provide a training but the training schedule was move to another date. Users who had already paid to them wants their cash back as they can't attend to the new schedule. A flame was started and the thread was a mess.  He said he wants the thread to be deleted as it of course ruined their name. And instead let the users reply to their own forum

He eventually become a friend though and I deleted the thread after a year and a half.

[Not of This World]

Thanks for the information on this. I have added in my forum TOS that they must send an email requesting their information to be removed after they've been moved into the closed group.

[dexterlablab1]

I never understood wanting to be deleted. If it's all that bad, why not simply just never come back?

[Dandello]

I never understood wanting to be deleted. If it's all that bad, why not simply just never come back?

From my own experience - the people who demand most loudly to have their accounts and posts deleted are the ones who were causing problems that got them banned in the first place. The second category are their buddies (or sockpuppets) who, realizing that Pig the troll got banned for cause, want to punish the rest of the members for not 'supporting' the local troll in his attempt at a reign of terror by trashing the forum for everybody else.

No matter what they claim, it has nothing to do with copyright issues or freedom of speech and everything to do with control and attempts to poison the well.

[ThisOldMan]

I never understood wanting to be deleted. If it's all that bad, why not simply just never come back?

I think it's kind of like a childish thing. Sort of like not allowing the forum to have the benefit of using their posts since they are not going to be there anymore. Said absence could be voluntary or involuntary.