More options when deleting accounts

[cesy]

Title:
More options when deleting accounts

Area:
account deletion

Summary:
Allow more options for the people who want to delete all their comments everywhere when deleting their journal, but still keep it safe if your account gets compromised.

Description:
(Original LJ Suggestion: http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/737448.html)

(This is mostly taken from a comment there by Azurelunatic.)

It would be nice if account deletion were offered at several levels:

Standard (delete journal, show comments elsewhere and comm posts in full, but struck through; after purge if someone renamed to that account the old comments would show up as being by ex_exampleuser123.) (the current situation)

Invisible (delete journal, screen comments elsewhere and retroactively friends-lock community posts; would be handled otherwise like a standard deletion. Screened comments could be un-screened by the owner of the journal that they're in, but if what you're looking to do is go as private as possible, this might be a start. This would require a lot of work on LJ's end, but would be not a social disaster.)

Anonymized (delete journal, retain text of comments and posts elsewhere, but show it as belonging to "Deleted User" unless/until the user undeletes; on purge it would break the link between comment and user so there would be no need to create an ex_ username.) (this would be abused badly by trolls, who would create-post-and-delete to attain some measure of anonymity)

Full (delete journal, make comments and posts elsewhere disappear a la suspension)

All of these would come with the standard 30-day window to change the mind, thus protecting from malicious account takeovers.

Some of these would be server-intensive, so non-standard options could come with a fee or require a paid account.

Poll #1263 More options when deleting accounts

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 28

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
5 (17.9%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
7 (25.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
8 (28.6%)

(I have no opinion)
8 (28.6%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[charmian]

Invisible (delete journal, screen comments elsewhere and retroactively friends-lock community posts; would be handled otherwise like a standard deletion. Screened comments could be un-screened by the owner of the journal that they're in, but if what you're looking to do is go as private as possible, this might be a start. This would require a lot of work on LJ's end, but would be not a social disaster.)

I agree with the anonymized and full options, but I am not for the "invisible" one as long as it means that comments will be screened without the consent of the journal owner.

[melannen]

I don't like anonymized: the user is an important part of the context of a comment or post, and I think if you want to remove that, you should delete the whole comment as well. And as you said, it's ripe for abuse, though if you charged money for it, it might be less likely.

I like the other options, though. Especially allowing a user to choose a full delete - it always seemed odd to me that the only way to get a full delete was to get suspended by abuse. If they're willing to do that for trolls, they should be willing to let people do it voluntarily.

(Make it difficult, though, because I hate the though of losing comments in my journals - or else disallow full delete for users, and allow users to choose whether to have comments by suspended users show in their personal journals.)

[zvi]

disallow full delete for users, and allow users to choose whether to have comments by suspended users show in their personal journals.)

I much prefer this.

[melannen]

Thet should probably be a separate suggestion on its own (I really like that idea, too - I see why they do it, but I hate automatically losing comments by suspended users). But I'll wait & see what happens with this suggestion, first.

[charmian]

Indeed: I agree. It seems to make no sense to allow trolls to do something, but not allow rule-abiding users to do it.

The way LJ is is that the commenter owns the comment (IIRC, I think this is law as well?), so I think that as much as I personally dislike for comments to go missing in my journals, fundamentally those comments are not mine, and especially if the user wishes to get rid of them, it's their right. Also, IIRC DW was talking about allowing people whose comments in other journals were imported as openID comments to mass delete all of their comments, so I think regular users should have this ability too.

I think of it sort of similarly to people who delete their fanfiction from archives because they're worried about work/family/whatever finding them. It sucks for the people who run the archives, but ultimately those works are not the property of the archivist.

[zvi]

It's not "allowed" for trolls, it's a required punishment, and it's a pretty violent disruption to the community ecosphere. My understanding has always been that they do that because the assumption is that anyone who's trolled enough to get banned from LJ has clearly behaved that badly in places they don't know about and weren't reported, so they're going to scorch the earth.

So far, the mass deletion of comments by OpenID users has been more vaporware than actual plan, and I, for one, have been glad of it. I think the barriers to deleting all the comments you ever made should be incredibly high; giving someone the ability to find all of their comments and that's it seems right to me. Or maybe deletion on a per journal basis; all the comments I ever made in exampleusername's journal, then in otherexample's journal, etc, etc.

The law is not at all clear about the status of blog comments, I think there's a strong case that, particularly in the case of LJ comments, they are part of a collective work with an implied perpetual license.

[charmian]

Not all users who were suspended on LJ were trolls who harassed others or otherwise violated LJ commenting policies. People who were suspended, for say, DMCA or other things also had all of their comments disappear.

I think that if a person is not deleting their comments in an abusive way (say, using it to cover up TOS violations in their comments to avoid being entirely banned from the service), they should be able to delete them, or have the option for a price, if it causes server problems (IMHO, having a high enough price will probably mean that only people who are very serious about it will bother); anyway, I suspect that once that a feature allowing users to see all of their comments is implemented, someone will create a script or something allowing for mass deletion.

Possibly, but it doesn't seem clear either way. I've seen some advise putting a "by commenting on this site you are granting the blog owner a license" agreement on the blog.

[msilverstar]

I so dislike losing comments, I'd like to avoid that whenever possible. I would much prefer to require several steps before deleting comments in other people's journal.

[ninetydegrees]

I've been wanting Full for ages so yes, please but I'm not sure about Invisible hence my vote.

[kate_nepveu]

I dislike Invisible because it's a false sense of security: the journal owner could just unscreen, after all.

I dislike Anonymized because of the troll potential.

While I don't wish for someone in my comments to do a Full delete, I can imagine circumstances in which they may feel they need to, and I think their need should override my preference.

So a vote for Standard and Full only.

[kyrielle]

This, yes.