Unblock Logins for Memorial Accounts

[sophie]

Title:
Unblock Logins for Memorial Accounts

Area:
Accounts

Summary:
In November last year, memorial accounts were blocked from logging in in order to prevent the deletion of entries from them in case anyone were to break into the account. Unfortunately, this can be somewhat problematic as negative comments cannot be deleted. I'd like to suggest that to overcome this, logins to memorial accounts should be allowed again, with the deletion of entries blocked.

Description:
One of the most obvious problems with being unable to log into memorial accounts is not being able to take action against any objectionable comments which may have been left by others. For example, if someone were to comment to a post saying hateful things about the person in question, that comment would either have to stay up, causing distress to people who read it, or someone would need to submit a support request to get the comment deleted, which would necessarily need to be escalated to admins, and involves talking to other people - which the person viewing the comment may not want to do. This, I feel, is unfair to friends and family who may be grieving.

The above also applies to other types of unwanted comment, including spam comments. It is unlikely in this case that anyone would ask Support to delete these because more spam will probably appear later anyway, which means that the comments remain on the entry, appearing extremely disrespectful.

I suggest that instead of blocking logins, we should allow logins but prevent the deletion of existing entries, which would accomplish the original purpose of the change. It does mean that unfortunately someone may be able to break in and delete all the *comments*, which would be a bad thing, but as I said above, I feel that the ability to delete comments in this case is important. I do feel, though, that to delete all the comments would be such a painstaking job that it would probably not be done.

In the end, I suppose it comes down to: Would it be preferable for a potential attacker to not be able to change anything at all while preventing harmful comments from being deleted, or would it be preferable to allow harmful comments to be deleted while risking that someone may break in and delete *all* the comments?

Poll #5988 Unblock Logins for Memorial Accounts

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 58

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
17 (29.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
21 (36.2%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
5 (8.6%)

(I have no opinion)
15 (25.9%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Any visitor, or just visitors in the memorial account's circle? Who would do the reviewing?

[stephenie_n_lamaina]

I was thinking about the reviewing like spam but I would assume the spam process is automated.

[azurelunatic]

Semi-automated. Since we're still a small site, we can still have human review of every piece of spam that's reported. I'm on the antispam team.

[stephenie_n_lamaina]

Well, I understand the whole freeze the site so that nothing can happen to it, but I know from working with Memory-Of.com website that people love to leave messages but there is always bozos that leave inappropriate messages. How many memorial sites are there? How many messages are we talking about? If there was a way for the public to flag the questionable messages, I would volunteer to help with sorting through the others.