Does Neowin delete member accounts?

It was suggested in another thread that this be posted for clarity, so here goes.

Should a Neowin member choose not to participate on Neowin anymore, there are 2 things you can do..

1. Log out, don't come back.
2. Clear out your profile by removing any personally-identifying information (Pii) and follow step 1.

If we continually deleted accounts, especially those from members who were warned by our moderators and/or for whatever reason got angry with something that happened here, we would have a small member base.

So really it is entirely up to you as a member if you want to be part of Neowin or not.

Neowin also never deleted a members contribution to the board, so in saying this please be sure you don't post sensitive information or Pii. Neowin will remove Pii on request, but we will not wipe a members post contribution, that only serves to screw up an untold numbers of topics and posts.

Additionally, we will every now and then delete dupe accounts and spammer accounts to make way for those names to be used by [future] genuine members, we have also in the past deleted accounts that have been inactive for a long time and a member has requested to use that inactive name. In the case of someone registering, never having posted and was only active in the same week (up to a year or more ago) means we will also delete it on request, should a member want to use that member name.

Last but not least, Neowin does not sell, give out or misuse your Pii or email address, ever. In fact, we probably send less "board mails" than any other board, other than the automated subscription to topics you yourself can activate (and disable) at will.

May 25 2018 GDPR update

From Friday, May 25 2018 we updated our forums to include GDPR compliant tools, such as the ability to anonymize a member that has chosen to leave Neowin (or has been banned) this can be done on request and is irreversible. In such cases you will have to prove you owned the account and reside in a GDPR enforced country.

Neowin does not sell any of the information you give to us to third parties, and in fact we only require a valid email address in order to complete registration of a member account at Neowin. What amounts to the little personal data required to register an account has not been misused and has been been safe with Neowin since we started, almost 21 years ago.

But what good is a large member base of inactive users?

I would think that deleting users who have made 0 total posts and not logged in for at least 12 months is a safe move.

We do that every now and then already.

Edit: We haven't done that for ages, we will look into this. Some members register just to see the hidden forums.

I've always agreed that sending staff/admins to delete accounts is stupid. In addition to the points you already made, snapshots of these posts are recorded on archive.org, so there is no way that the Neowin gods can make a suddenly regretful user just disappear.

yeah deleting users is always a bad idea, mainly because you either delete posts with that user, or you suddenly have posts with no author.. Then things just get messy

Threads with no author post and thus no subject make absolutely no sense. It really mucks up the database.

We have done at least one mass pruning of zero post users. Perhaps that was done during a board upgrade.

I agree with the no deletion policy. I've seen many members return after a long time (sometimes years) even since I've been here. They would be annoyed to come back and find their accounts deleted.

Well, for British members, unless Neowin has applied to Information Commissioner?s Office in order to act as a Data Controller it has no legal right to retain personal information of any kind. Of course, if Neowin considers itself exempt to EU or UK data-protection laws, which requires all personal data to be destroyed after the purpose it is used for is completed, there is no problem.

Considering a member can delete all personal data from their profile, all the remains in effect a username which is hard to claim as "personal information", however if Neowin also retains the email address used for registration it's another matter entirely.

We have a Privacy Statement here: https://www.neowin.net/privacy/ although deleting forum posts from the contribution to the forums isn't something we enforce.

At Neowin we expect the registered members to be responsible for what they post.

In the first post you mention the possibility of deleting an inactive account should a member want to use the name. Where would a member make such a request? :D

Please contact a supervisor about this, they'll be able to help you out.

We do that every now and then already.

Edit: We haven't done that for ages, we will look into this. Some members register just to see the hidden forums.

May I suggest then having new members post say 100 posts then having the hidden forums 'unlock' for them?

That would mean even the new members would have to contribute something to see the awesome stuff in the hidden forums :)

May I suggest then having new members post say 100 posts then having the hidden forums 'unlock' for them?

That would mean even the new members would have to contribute something to see the awesome stuff in the hidden forums :)

They can always check your last time active on the forum.

Your account where? If you're talking about Neowin, you can't.