Can a user delete their own account or does it need to be done by a mod?

why do you want to do that?
And no, you can't DIY

Personal preference, I'll still lurk and maybe join the new NA when it's born.

Mods, please delete my account when time permits.

Nobody can or will delete your account.

Not even a yellow mod? Technical or access based limitation?

is a ban basically the same thing?

Just stop coming to the site and logging in. Nobody can delete your account. I don't see any purpose in being able to do so anyway?

Dain used to be able to, but nobody else can.

Even then, your name js just changed to "removed (date)", none of your posts are deleted.

Is it a common modern forum feature to allow this? I'd imagine the database cleanup/rake operations after an account delete are pretty tedious, especially if you include individual post deletions (which would alter thread reply counts, etc), transactions, friends/foes (in both directions), feedback, etc. If it were at all manual and I were the admin, I'd definitely deny the requests unless there's a legal or other pressing/convincing reason to do so.

Over the years I've been members of mostly vBulletin-based forums, and if I recall the admins had pretty good technical reasons for not allowing full deletions. I'd assume that applies fairly broadly unless the software itself has the user delete ability fully built-in and tested (trusted) at scale. On here, even a search for posts by user can take a long time, so even if Dain had built in this feature, it could temporarily put excessive load on the database(s) and introduce the opportunity for degraded performance and data loss. In the hands of any user, that could be problematic.

More like just delete the user account and personal data and leave the posts. I've changed my email to a fake email and that changes your password as well. So it sent the new password to a fake email address and I'll log out of my browsers.

See y'all in V2 hopefully.

You're just going to the store to get some milk, right? You'll be back??

Papa why!?!?
 

Pretty sure you're going to have to call somebody at least a cornball cocksucker for your request to be taken seriously.

Come on, surely you see the purpose of having your account deleted if desired?
Wanting to delete your trace in this digital age is a completely natural thing.
Sometimes you don't want all your stuff being up there for all to see, for various reasons.
If you ever build a new forum (which I hope you do), and you decide to not implement a way to delete users, such a decision would be quite baffling.

Not being able to is a different thing, understandable!

The universal norm with forum software is that someone with administrative permissions can "delete" accounts. This however simply removes the user info on the account and access to the account itself. As has been stated earlier in this thread, Dain COULD fulfill this request, but it doesn't delete your posts or transactions etc., merely leaving everything as-is but changing the username to something like "Anonymous User".

Actually DELETING an account and all traces of it would wreak havoc with the way the software works. 

I hear ya.

Just removing the username from the said posts and interactions goes a long way though. Many would perhaps even consider that sort of a deletion.

 

In that case a "band-aid" fix could be the user (OP in this case) getting a name change and then perma-ban. If that's enough to put a person at ease I see no issue with it (here on NA anyway).
 

Perfect makeshift solution!

 

Just change your username to something random. Anyone can do that on their own.

Honestly, it's not hard to remove any of the users personal contact info/personal data and have the "removed blah blah" without any integrity issues of the site. Delete all PM's of that user as well and you're good to go.

The fact that this isn't an option here is beyond annoying. Is this going to be a feature of the new site or is it going to be a staunch "no"? In the EU, it's a law that you have to, and I'd be surprised if that law doesn't eventually make its way over to the USA or Canada. But, regardless of law, it should be common practice.

It's also somewhat disconcerting that you don't see a point in it. You don't have to see the "point", but this is a valid request. The fact Jeff ignored my PM's about this speaks volumes and one of the reasons why I've stopped most posting around here (especially in the private threads I'm apart of).

If you don't see the point in it, why is your selling point SSL on the new site?

Just don't tell him you can view the previous username history anyways. SSHHHHHH.

It really doesn't.  He ignores everyone's pm's about everything. 

 

Perhaps, but that would never show up on a google or any other search.