Deleting Accounts

Papad

I was always curious if the reason for not deleting accounts was to up your user base. With all the bans that goes on, Boards will eventually reach the 1 Billion user count in a few months.

If it has to do with parentless posts, then a suitable solution is not that difficult e.g. just use a 'poster is dead to us' username for orphaned posts.

Gordon

Then how do you distinguish between posts made by different 'poster is dead to us' users?

Papad

Gordon wrote: »

Then how do you distinguish between posts made by different 'poster is dead to us' users?

That would be a bit of a nightmare, so I would use just one generic username. And since some posters are concerned about privacy issues, then it may be a solution for them too (i.e. delete their account by request, and then their previous posts cannot be tracked by their boards name).

Gordon

Then the posts these people have made will all show as coming from the same user, seeing a high number of posts made by the same person will make people think that this one user has a multitude of knowledge bases (some with provable knowledge giving credence to an opinion/fact, while some showing no prior knowledge hence giving the post less credence) and that would cause confusion.

Papad

You could call the account "Deleted User", with a post count always set to Zero.

Gordon

That doesn't solve the problem I pointed out in post #4.