Are there any safeguards against your account being deleted by various means such as user accident, software glitch, or someone hacking into an account? I have an empty second account associated with another email I’d like to delete, but it scares me that in trying to delete it, I might somehow delete my real account.
If you accidentally delete your account, you can email help@inaturalist.org, and they should be able to help you reinstate it, although the content will be gone.
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Hi @dan_johnson, the current protection in place is this:
- you have to be logged into your account - to help protect against other people accessing it, don’t share your account information and don’t stay logged in on public computers
- on the account settings page it says Danger Zone and you have to click Delete your account
- it confirms the number of observations/IDs (so you should be able to easily distinguish that info from your 2nd empty account when viewing this page)
- you must type in your username (again to confirm it’s the right account)
- you must press the Delete button
Note:
Furthermore, this action cannot be undone. If you change your mind later, you aren’t getting any of that content back.
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I think that it has been mentioned in the past that in extreme situations, iNat staff can load back observations etc from backups. I agree though, there is a massive “but what if” at play when doing anything of that nature!
There was this thread discussing the topic: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/dealing-with-account-deletion/93
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