Design/UX #18995
openClarifying 'delete account' text
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Description
After discussing the deleted account problems in #18982 during the community call today, we agreed we should strengthen/clarify the text and prompts on the Delete Account screen in Settings.
I've attached how it looks/reads right now, though of course this will change visually with the upcoming release.
Boone, for starters, can you help us confirm the content types that will be removed when an account is deleted? Posts, pages, uploaded media, files in any Group libraries, etc? Is it easy to get a list of those?
Then we will figure out how much to say on the screen itself, while linking out to documentation that covers the other deletion implications. We should at least say up front that before deleting your account, you should attempt to contact fellow admins of any jointly-managed Sites or Groups to ensure they have re-attributed anything they want to save before your deletion.
Files
Related issues
Updated by Colin McDonald 11 months ago
- Related to Support #18982: Sites missing pages, menus, icons, banners added
Updated by Syelle Graves 10 months ago
Thank you for this, Colin and Boone.
Chris Stein and I were also wondering: Could there be a way to merge (the content of) accounts, instead of deleting one account?
And, related to https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/18982, should we routinely try to reassign all page and post authors to a current team member, every time a team member leaves? Regarding media, and most recent edits to other authors' posts--which we found got deleted on one of our sites when Juwon deleted her account--how would we even reassign those elements?
Updated by Boone Gorges 10 months ago
I'll try to assemble a description of what happens on user deletion in the next few days, unless Ray beats me to it.
During our call today, we talked about a couple of changes to user deletion that we might consider:
- In the short term, we might change the confirmation page so that it summarizes the specific content that will be deleted. This can include a summary of group memberships and content (forum posts, files, etc), as well as a summary of the user's sites, with a description of what will happen to their content on each of those sites. In cases where the action is destructive - content is deleted irrevocably - we can give instructions or point to documentation on how to back it up, export it, or reassign authorship. The process of assembling this information for display will be a bit finicky, but because it'd be purely informational (no internal toggles, etc) it should be somewhat straightforward to implement in the shorter term.
- We might expand on this first item by providing tools right on the confirmation page that will help the user deal with content. For example, each of a user's sites might have a dropdown/radio that allows the user to select whether their content on that site is deleted, trashed, or reassigned.
- Colin suggested a system where content associated with a deleted user is not deleted immediately, but instead is put into some "trash" state for a set amount of time - say, 30 days - before being deleted altogether. This is technically complicated, in part because there are so many types of content, and many of them don't have the concept of "trash". So it would be a longer-term possibility.
The first step here is to summarize exactly what currently happens on the Commons when a user deletes their own account. This will include BP content (profile, friendships, group memberships, group content like docs/files/forums) as well as WP content (site memberships, sites where the user is the sole member, sites where the user is the sole admin, sites where the user's content could be reassigned, etc).
Updated by Syelle Graves 10 months ago
Hi all,
We have a follow-up question: I had recommended that Juwon add one Commons account user to each site, promote herself to admin, then remove the user account she had planned to delete from each site.
However, I followed up on that, and Juwon told me that she did not remove the first user account from any of the sites before deleting the account.
If she had done that--removed the user she deleted from all sites (as admin)--would her site content not have been deleted?
Maybe the answer to this could be taken into account for the updated account text deletion wording?
Updated by Boone Gorges 10 months ago
I'm unsure of the precise answer to your question, Syelle, but I can say with some certainty that content deletion depends not on who's an admin of a site, but instead on who is the author (the post_author column in the posts table) of the content. I'm unsure how we'd capture your precise situation (which seems pretty complicated?) in the account deletion language. But I think that what we can include is best practices for group sites, which might involve a certain list of things (like manually reattributing content) you can do in order to preserve content. This latter language would probably help to mitigate confusion in cases like yours.
Updated by Boone Gorges about 14 hours ago
- Target version set to 2.5.0
I'd like to perform this analysis and think about some clarificatory text for 2.5.0. The City Tech OpenLab just went through a bunch of work to catalog what happens when an account is deleted. http://redmine.citytech.cuny.edu/issues/3340 Here's the text they ended up with:
Deleting your account You may wish to export your work before deleting it so you can save a copy for future use. Find out more about exporting your work. When you delete your account, the following will be deleted: Your OpenLab profile and account information Pages on OpenLab sites created by you Discussion topics and replies created by you Docs created by you Files and other media posted by you. Site posts and comments written by you will not be deleted, but the author will be changed to "Account Deleted." This is because posts and comments may be part of a conversation with other OpenLab members. If you want to delete these items, you should first delete them and then delete your account. Courses, projects, clubs, and portfolios created by you will not be deleted. This is because they may include important work created by you and others. If you want to delete these items, you should first delete them and then delete your account. Please consider other OpenLab members. For instance, if you created a group project, others may still need the work they did there. Instead of deleting the whole project, you could just delete your own work.
As part of the project, we also made a change such that BuddyPress Docs and WP Media items are deleted on user-account deletion, something that doesn't happen by default. http://redmine.citytech.cuny.edu/issues/3399