Following up on this long thread in our Google Group . There has been a lot of discussion over the negative consequences of account deletion, mainly: When observations are deleted, that occurrence data is no longer available on iNaturalist. When an observation is deleted, the IDs and comments …

I just realized we do have some things already like the Wikipedia stance. When taxa are created, given common names, default taxa images, etc, those actions (being more like meta-data than personal data), are retained when a user leaves. So my above ideas aren’t really something wholly new, but an…

Consider also the contributions of a former Curator, like added taxa, taxon swaps, Taxon Framework Relationships, flag resolutions, names added to taxa, etc. While these are not always visible publicly, they are often visible (and often personally identifiable) by iNat users, and certainly by other…

Just realized my post was but an expansion of the points you had already made about parallels with community metadata on Wikipedia. So yes, what you said! (Still getting used to the new forum…)

Looking back to the original post, I think that would entirely be a useful point. Having the control over what contributions are deleted and which aren’t would be very useful (and, to a point, useful to security). Having options would also help deal with a variety of situations. I think it’s also go…

I agree that more options should make it more likely that content will be retained and not deleted (hopefully!) [image] jonathan142: I might opt a bit against personally-deleted IDs appearing under a full history I agree! It probably wasn’t clear in my original post, but I had envisaged IDs …

Update: we’ve added a new interstitial when someone asks to delete their account. Here’s what it looks like: [image] I’ve also added the above to the original post for this topic.

Excellent! That nicely covers the warning of how impactful a deletion can be :) I still think we need a time period, but I think the above will be sufficient. There would be very few situations where deletion needed to happen immediately, and a period of, say, 3 days for the deletion to take effect…

You now have to type in your username and click “Delete your account”. Although I understand its use case, I’m personally not for a “cooling off” period, but I also don’t understand how one can get so angry as to delete in a fit of emotion. If someone wants to start a new thread about situations th…

ahh that makes me so sad to see! i guess it’s considered a necessary evil and no point carrying on about. I hope you will consider making a ‘sticky’ algorithim ID at least so one can retain that info without having to agree with all IDs ever just in case

@charlie I’m not sure what you’re referring to here?

Dealing with Account Deletion

General

tiwane March 14, 2019, 8:10pm 36

Update: we’ve added a new interstitial when someone asks to delete their account. Here’s what it looks like:

I’ve also added the above to the original post for this topic.

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Dealing with Account Deletion

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