TD;LR: If a person wants their account deleted, the most likely scenario will be we anonymize the account and deactivate it, we won’t delete all the posts or anything unless this is a last resort.
In the past I get every once in ahwile people requesting their account to be deleted off the forum for whatever reason. Due to some plugins we have this causes issues as in order to delete an account, it requires us to delete all the posts a user has made, this can be up to thousands if not tens of thousands of posts.
This deletion process makes lot of posts empty, or replies just not making any sense as context is removed. I mentioned plugins, due to some plugins in order for us to delete posts, especially with users who made posts with the ratings plugin, we are unable to do so. If we wanted to be able to delete said users, we would have to turn the form off, rebuild the forum without the plugin, delete the posts, delete the user, turn the forum off and rebuild again with the plugin enabled.
As you can see this is not very straight forward and requires a lot work simply for just deleting all of a users posts. So with that being said, going forward if a user requests a account deletion for whatever reason, we will anonymize the account instead of deleting it and deactivate it so it can no longer be logged in from.
There may be cases where we actually do need to delete an account, and if a situation like that arises the account may take months to delete because we wont be taking the forum down twice for every account that needs to be deleted.
