I think it’s quite understandable to mourn the disappearance of a user and to feel discombobulated by this. I also mourn the loss of knowledge and expertise that accompanies such account deletions.
I’m going to reiterate some of what I said in another thread before it went off track.
Given that this has happened repeatedly in the last several months, I want to second the plea for some other way for deletion of accounts to be handled. It’s not just the issue that literally thousands of observations now need to be re-IDed, but that there’s no way of telling which observations those are, and in many cases the history of ID refinements, alterations, etc. has also been erased.
The fact that there is no trace whatsoever that an ID was once there is fairly disturbing. One questions one’s own memory – hadn’t someone suggested a different/more specific ID for that observation, or am I imagining it? Something changed, and yet there is no record whatsoever of what happened.
This strikes me as a bit unusual; discussion forums, comment threads, etc. that I am familiar with on other websites don’t typically simply delete content without a trace in such cases; there is generally some indication that someone deleted something or the content from a deactivated user has been removed. I see the IDs and comments connected with an observation as a form of discussion, and removing parts of that discussion may make it incoherent.
The fact that iNat is not just a social community, but also a collection of data that is used for scientific purposes, makes this deletion practice even more troublesome.
Even just a line of text replacing the vanished ID or comment to indicate that content has been deleted (without a user name or indication of what the specific ID was) would be a big improvement. If iNat staff prefer as a matter of principle to provide users options for completely deleting all past account activity, including IDs, it seems to me that a note of this type would fulfill this requirement and at least alert users to the fact that something is missing. (I would prefer the ID to at least be displayed, but I would settle for “an ID/comment by an inactive user was here”).
Second, while I agree that it isn’t appropriate to speculate about why a specific user might have deleted their account, I do think that such instances should give us cause to take a hard look at whether there is something not working the way it should on iNat. Account deletion by active users should not be a regular occurrence, particularly given the repercussions that this has for the collective database. Obviously we can’t know what those reasons are, but most of the possibilities I can think of are quite concerning.
Either the account deletions are impulsive and users don’t really understand that account deletion results in deletion of all previous activity, or there are some very powerful reasons for deleting their account rather than just logging out and never returning.
In the first case, I find it hard to imagine that a user in good standing suddenly wakes up one morning and decides “I don’t feel like using iNat anymore, I’m going to delete my account along with the thousands of IDs I have spent hundreds of hours making”. However, I suppose it is possible that some users do delete their accounts impulsively because they are upset about something and potentially regret this decision later on. If this applies to a significant percentage of deleted accounts, it might make sense to implement a “cooling off period” of, say, a week or so, before which the account deletion is not final.
What particularly worries me is the possibility that some of these account deletions are not the result of a one-off argument or personal, non-iNat related reasons like stalking, but rather the outcome of long-standing conflicts that could not be resolved via other means, or of persistent issues of feeling unwelcome/unwanted etc. I haven’t been aware of this happening, but if it is a factor in the recent instances, then we collectively need to figure out what we can change so that users don’t decide that account deletion is their only option.