Topic: Make deleting an account delete every bit of information on the site.

Posted under Site Bug Reports & Feature Requests

Make pressing "Delete account" in the settings actually remove every reference to that account from the platform. Some of us don't like using the same username from like 7 years ago. Admins and people on this site are just rude in general and literally don't care. I'm sick of the zoophiles replies I'm forced to read in my replies from years ago and it's disgusting. The website has trash systems in place so you're just forced to live with whatever you said in the past. All of my comments were ones I made while I was underage browsing this site at the ripe age of 15. Nice way to learn about people who were into having sex with literal feral animals at a young age, however. I'm trailing off the main topic, but yeah that's the most basic feature any site should have.

I'm like 100% sure making a forum post doesn't matter either and the suggestion won't even be considered. It's been years and there still isn't a way to delete your account completely. I'll live with it but try and do better at making basic website features lmao. I'm not replying to any comments and I'm not using this site to argue. Take my suggestion and either lock the post because you're mad I'm criticizing the site or reply with some unfunny response. Either way, I don't care and am only making this final post out of spite because the moderation team for this site is the worst I've ever dealt with.

Updated by Cinder


User received a record for the contents of this message.

You have like 13 comments total.
Hiding them all would have taken you significantly less time than typing out this ridiculous attention-seeking rant.

I see that you still haven't matured past the mental age of 15.
The fact that you can't seem to find the "Edit" button and are losing your mind over it is a comment on your own intelligence, not ours.
Just grow up and get over yourself.

Updated

OP's rant aside, I do agree that more information should be deleted upon deletion of the account. I think it's a really long stretch to call what is effectively renaming an account and changing the password so you can't access it "account deletion", I have doubts that it's even GDPR/CCPA compliant to begin with.

Yeah, having to hide 13 comments yourself would be much faster than writing an unhinged rant like this, but what about the people who have made 4000 comments? Keeping forum posts is one thing, since they're often required as part of a discussion for tag relationship requests, but comments/blips/etc are not vital for the site in any way and likely to be full of personal information. If anybody suggests "You can just click the hide button 4000 times" you're just as unhinged as this guy.

I'd argue that "deleting" your account is actually worse for your digital privacy, since you don't have access to it afterwards to clean up information you didn't want there.

faucet said: ...

I'm not a lawyer, but I am fairly certain that E6 is GDPR compliant.
We are under an obligation to delete personal information.
Neither comments, blips, forum posts, or uploaded artwork fall under that.

cinder said:
I'm not a lawyer, but I am fairly certain that E6 is GDPR compliant.
We are under an obligation to delete personal information.
Neither comments, blips, forum posts, or uploaded artwork fall under that.

All of those things (minus the uploaded artwork for the most part, but there's always the option filing a takedown if it's your art) can absolutely count as personal information depending on how they're used - most legislation keeps their definition of personal information as vague as possible, but any information that could potentially lead to an individual being identified, directly or indirectly, is covered. If you can piece together multiple blips (which you can, because they're all still associated with the same account ID) and find the information that the user was born in 1987 and works at an olive farm in Bordighera, Italy that's personal information. If they ever commented or blipped any links to their social media accounts that is most definitely personal information.

faucet said:
All of those things (minus the uploaded artwork for the most part, but there's always the option filing a takedown if it's your art) can absolutely count as personal information depending on how they're used - most legislation keeps their definition of personal information as vague as possible, but any information that could potentially lead to an individual being identified, directly or indirectly, is covered. If you can piece together multiple blips (which you can, because they're all still associated with the same account ID) and find the information that the user was born in 1987 and works at an olive farm in Bordighera, Italy that's personal information. If they ever commented or blipped any links to their social media accounts that is most definitely personal information.

Sure, they can, but they aren't by default.
If someone wants messages containing that kind of information to be deleted, they can request it and we'll honor it.

But there is no requirement to delete all messages they ever left on the site alongside their account.

un30492984 said:
I'm sick of the zoophiles replies I'm forced to read in my replies from years ago and it's disgusting.

You aren't "forced" to read anything. Stop whining.

un30492984 said:
The website has trash systems in place so you're just forced to live with whatever you said in the past. All of my comments were ones I made while I was underage browsing this site at the ripe age of 15. Nice way to learn about people who were into having sex with literal feral animals at a young age, however.

So you voluntarily created an account for a site with explicit content while underage (violating the ToS) and then chose to interact with other users of said site.
This is 100% on you.

EDIT: And you're a hypocrite.

Updated

Completely agree that staff is not receptive of critical feedback and usually don't engage on polite (or equal) terms 2/3rds of the time. (see next post below)

Might be something to do with the volunteers believing such people aren't owed an ounce of decency. Could be exhaustion, or just being so aggressive as to bait people into arguing so they have a reason to throw the hammer. But it's such a poor excuse to at least try to be nice. Not very professional.

Sure, it's their right to operate how they want, but it really gives E621 as a whole a bad mark, and several people I talk to have similar sentiment. Some artists avoid this place because of it. And it doesn't help that calling them out (as anyone should with any position of power) are typically shot down rather than de-escalated.

Honestly reminds me of GMod server admins. I can see the staff is evidently trying to do better, but I'd like to see one of them admit there's a problem. Volunteers or not, they represent the community more than the people they serve records on, and that's a testament to the otherwise excellent care they put into keeping the experience clean for everyone.

I don't like that the OP poorly handled it either. But someone fires the first shot.

-

As for your other less volatile point, anonymisation of public-facing information is the best you'll get, since staff needs the metrics to handle troublemakers effectively. This is written in the GDPR that hosts are allowed to do this.

I think a checkbox to automatically hide all of your comments when you delete your account can be a valid option.

cinder said:
But there is no requirement to delete all messages they ever left on the site alongside their account.

Huh. That sounds like it should be wrong, but eh. Cba to check for myself.

Updated

aversioncapacitor' said:
I think a checkbox to automatically hide all of your comments when you delete your account can be a valid option.

Though that wouldn't hide any replies containing the comments. Replies don't directly reference the original comment to know if the original comment is still visible, but rather copy it when making the reply. It's also why you can see the original name if a user changes their name after someone replied to their comment. It'd be a lot more difficult if not impossible to automatically clear a users' comments that are in replies since there's no direct link.

watsit said:
I don't like that the OP poorly handled it either. But someone fires the first shot.

So here we have a guy who edited 8 comments to call staff members stupid.
The guy who admitted to making an account when he was underage.
The same guy who told someone to kill themselves.

But according to you, he wasn't the one who started it?..
That's some ass-backwards logic, my dude.

aversioncapacitor' said:
Huh. That sounds like it should be wrong, but eh. Cba to check for myself.

That's what I read online, and what I gathered from previous staff discussions on the matter.
From what I understand, the only thing we really need to delete is their email address.
If they request their private data that we collect, we only need to provide their email address and IP addresses.

But again, I am not a lawyer, so I've no idea if this is true either.

Updated

cinder said:
But according to you, he wasn't the one who started it?..

Nah, think premeditation.
Something happened to that guy that caused them to think that way.
Sometime in the past they had a bad experience and held that grudge all this time.

Right person would take that to mind and move on. This guy definitely didn't, but it doesn't mean standards should be lowered to their level.

edit: to be specific, the comments "Now get lost." "The fact that you can't figure out how to press the "Hide" button is a comment on your intelligence, not ours." are wholly unnecessary and can be omitted or phrased better.

edit2: I will also admit that I have some selection bias due to my own experience, and I apologise for this.
Checking the mod queue most of Cinder's (and others') recent actions are not as colorful as this single feedback. Appreciate that you heard out my concern though.

Updated

aversioncapacitor' said:
I think a checkbox to automatically hide all of your comments when you delete your account can be a valid option.

That's possibly the best suggestion so far. The OP is majorly derping, though.

aversioncapacitor' said:
edit: to be specific, the comments "Now get lost." "The fact that you can't figure out how to press the "Hide" button is a comment on your intelligence, not ours." are wholly unnecessary and can be omitted or phrased better.

TBF, I was thinking of basically the exact same response but less snark, haha.

Interesting new development: NotMeNotYou has, in fact, done exactly what OP requested for a different account, user #150520. All of their comments are now hidden, and any comments replying to them have been edited. As if to demonstrate the futility of these actions, enough context remains that I can still fairly easily determine that this used to be the account of FA user Zackashang.

So is this site policy now? Such requests used to be routinely denied, as seen here.

wat8548 said:
Interesting new development: NotMeNotYou has, in fact, done exactly what OP requested for a different account, user #150520. All of their comments are now hidden, and any comments replying to them have been edited. As if to demonstrate the futility of these actions, enough context remains that I can still fairly easily determine that this used to be the account of FA user Zackashang.

So is this site policy now? Such requests used to be routinely denied, as seen here.

Can't say I'm 100% sure it's them, but it seems plausible it's zackashang, seeing the information scattered around.

wat8548 said:
As if to demonstrate the futility of these actions, enough context remains that I can still fairly easily determine that this used to be the account of FA user ...

Well, at least an attempt was made. While it's probably true, the remaining evidence that I can see is only circumstancial, it could well have just been a fan of the aforementioned artist uploading their content. It's hard to delete all information about somebody without causing some sort of damage to the database's integrity, but this is a good step forward from "we won't hide your comments because we don't have to", especially when there's such little value in keeping them publicly viable in the first place.

It's also worth noting that since this thread there was a commit on GitHub that will no longer log username changes to the mod actions, unless changed by an administrator, in which case only the current username will be available. Related or not, it's another good change in favour of privacy.

faucet said:
Well, at least an attempt was made. While it's probably true, the remaining evidence that I can see is only circumstancial, it could well have just been a fan of the aforementioned artist uploading their content. It's hard to delete all information about somebody without causing some sort of damage to the database's integrity, but this is a good step forward from "we won't hide your comments because we don't have to", especially when there's such little value in keeping them publicly viable in the first place.

It's also worth noting that since this thread there was a commit on GitHub that will no longer log username changes to the mod actions, unless changed by an administrator, in which case only the current username will be available. Related or not, it's another good change in favour of privacy.

Huh, that's interesting. At least an effort is being made. Though if you have many comments and people responding to said comments, your old name may get archived in the mentions section of you go back far enough*, which makes removing previous names from mod actions less effective.

*Well you have to go through their comments instead of the mentions section, so that's more work.

I assume the changes only occur when the site updates, since name changes are still logged.

Updated

un30492984 said:
Make pressing "Delete account" in the settings actually remove every reference to that account from the platform. Some of us don't like using the same username from like 7 years ago. Admins and people on this site are just rude in general and literally don't care. I'm sick of the zoophiles replies I'm forced to read in my replies from years ago and it's disgusting. The website has trash systems in place so you're just forced to live with whatever you said in the past. All of my comments were ones I made while I was underage browsing this site at the ripe age of 15. Nice way to learn about people who were into having sex with literal feral animals at a young age, however. I'm trailing off the main topic, but yeah that's the most basic feature any site should have.

I'm like 100% sure making a forum post doesn't matter either and the suggestion won't even be considered. It's been years and there still isn't a way to delete your account completely. I'll live with it but try and do better at making basic website features lmao. I'm not replying to any comments and I'm not using this site to argue. Take my suggestion and either lock the post because you're mad I'm criticizing the site or reply with some unfunny response. Either way, I don't care and am only making this final post out of spite because the moderation team for this site is the worst I've ever dealt with.

You make it sound like e6 hurt you personally. Maybe you shouldn't have been here when you were 15. Don't cry to us about your self caused problems.

wat8548 said:
Interesting new development: NotMeNotYou has, in fact, done exactly what OP requested for a different account, user #150520. All of their comments are now hidden, and any comments replying to them have been edited.

I believe I've seen it done once or twice before since my time here. Notably it seems to require at least some manual work as NMNY went through and did the edits themself, likely for reasons I mentioned earlier relating to replies not being directly linked to the original comment, so it can't be done automatically on account deletion. A comment search for the username also only gets you so far, especially if the username is a common word.

I believe the only reason it was done manually, was because of being a minor. That user shouldn't have been here in the first place.

wat8548 said:
Interesting new development: NotMeNotYou has, in fact, done exactly what OP requested for a different account, user #150520. All of their comments are now hidden, and any comments replying to them have been edited. As if to demonstrate the futility of these actions, enough context remains that I can still fairly easily determine that this used to be the account of FA user Zackashang.

So is this site policy now? Such requests used to be routinely denied, as seen here.

We sometimes honor this request on a case by case basis when there is a need for it.

alphamule said:
I believe the only reason it was done manually, was because of being a minor. That user shouldn't have been here in the first place.

Yet some minors just simply get perma banned?

benjiboyo said:
Yet some minors just simply get perma banned?

I guess staff only do it when they ask for it, and when it's a minor request?

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