I know, it's been posted before: Account deletion.

[Cal_da_Darth]

I've scanned the site and these forums for about 20 minutes trying to figure out how to delete my account. One thread led to another, and the soon I found such a discussion:

 

One gentlemen politely request deletion of his account since he no longer used it. A user replied: "If you don't use your account, just leave, there's no need to delete it." The gentlemen replied again, insisting that his account be deleted.

 

At last an administrator aptly replied with a one word answer: "No." No expalanation of why, just simply no.

 

I'm not sure why there's no account deletion policy on this Web site, but I hope someone will reconsider. Google crawls this site and archives - well, everything - thus while Google searching my name, a thread came up from nearly six years ago, when I was freshman in high school, and stupidly posted my real name.

 

Frustrated (as I'm on the job hunt), I want only for it to be deleted, but now have reason to believe all I'll get is juvenille witicisms and one-word replies instead.

 

If not for me, but the sake of your users, I encourage administrators to please reconsider. On the administrative side, it's just good netiquette. I personally would like my account deleted, and hope someone can offer that courtesy to me.

 

If not, well - please advise.

[Det. Bart Lasiter]

Delete your posts?

[Thrik]

We do not delete accounts because a huge batch of posts suddenly disappearing could very easily make some threads difficult to follow, confusing people reading them for whatever reason (perhaps an old thread with interesting/useful info). I'm personally a strong believer in maintaining community history as purely as possible, and hundreds of posts vanishing without any evidence that they were ever there is not the best way of achieving that.

 

It's also a pain because when you delete a vBulletin account, the posts are not deleted -- they are simply associated with the 'Guest' account. Deleting the posts themselves requires the script to go through the whole database and look for any matches, which can be a little stressful on the server and also requires us to do various other things such as rebuild the forum search indexes and post counters. All very inconvenient and disruptive.

 

If you didn't want certain information to be available on the web then it's really your own responsibility for not thinking when you posted it. You're free to edit out information that you don't want people to find, but in all likelihood it'll continue to persist on the internet for a very long time as services like Web Archive exist, as well as Google's own tendency to not remove the meta information in its result pages for a long time.

 

If it's just an employer worry, editing your name out of your old posts should be just as effective as deletion would be. We can also rename your forum account if you want us to.