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The answer to How can I delete my account? states that

Your network profile on stackexchange.com will be automatically deleted within 24 hours (whenever it attempts to sync again), unless you have ever manually logged in directly on stackexchange.com - in that case, you have a physical profile there and it will need to be deleted by staff.

(emphasis mine)

How do I know if the part in bold applies to me without actually deleting my account? Can regular users somehow confirm this about their own accounts?

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  • I'm not sure it matters for you in particular. If you wanted to delete all your accounts you would have to contact support to delete your Area51 account anyway so you could just request the network profile be deleted too.
    – Laurel
    Commented Dec 8, 2022 at 3:26
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    @Laurel I'm not trying to delete my account. I was just reading that answer and wondered if there's a mechanism for users to find out whether or not they have a real profile on stackexchange.com because I didn't even know that was possible until today.
    – 41686d6564
    Commented Dec 8, 2022 at 3:56

1 Answer 1

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There is no publicly visible indicator to determine whether you have a profile on stackexchange.com - the usual options that staff can look at to quickly determine whether it's a real profile or a generated profile are only visible while logged in. And well, the act of logging in there automatically creates the profile so a user wouldn't be able to check their own profile without... creating the profile and thus rendering the activity moot (there's no confirmation of wanting to create the profile there, it just gets created when you first login).

So, in practice, it's not possible for you to know if you don't remember whether you've ever logged in there. That is why we advise users deleting their profiles to wait 24 hours to see if it disappears. If it doesn't, then they likely have a profile there. Though, because stackexchange.com doesn't confirm creating a new profile, we've had plenty of instances of users trying to login there to verify it's really deleted, and get stuck in a cycle of constantly recreating the profile. But that's another fun tangent.

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