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A while back I asked to have a question disassociated from my account (this one). It was, but today I noticed that it still appears on my profile page on most Stack Exchange sites where I have an account (example: SO) under "Top Network Posts", and under Top Questions on the main Stack Exchange site.

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  • This question may now also need to be disassociated from your account, depending on how hard you want it to be for someone to make the connection. And the link to your profile removed... and the history purged... oy.
    – Air
    Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 22:58
  • See also: meta.stackexchange.com/q/269711/162102
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented May 17, 2016 at 3:22
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    @air the only solution is to delete the question itself from whatever site it is on. We've done this a few times on Workplace to work around this bug. Regrettably it's normally highly upvoted content.
    – enderland
    Commented May 21, 2016 at 14:32
  • See also: Top posts taken from hidden communities
    – Stevoisiak
    Commented Jun 30, 2017 at 18:50
  • This could have legal implications - as the CC BY-SA licenses require post dissociation and it's not completely carried out.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Jul 24, 2021 at 7:11
  • @Sonic worth mentioning it in the question somehow, not only as tag.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jul 24, 2021 at 7:24

1 Answer 1

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The underlying mechanic here was fixed a while ago, probably a couple of years. But it can only be fixed per-user manually when we know it needs to be fixed.

I've run the fix for you, and the question no longer appears on your profile.

If anyone else who had a post disassociated many years ago still sees it on their network profile, please contact us.

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    Given the nature of the issue, it would be a good idea to do a single-run batch process over all users to clear any currently outstanding issues. After all, the affected users have already asked, at least once, for this to happen when they asked to be dissociated from any such post. It really shouldn't be necessary for them to notice the issue and ask again, possibly years later. Obviously, once started, the batch process doesn't need to complete rapidly, so could be given as low a resource priority as is needed to not impact other operations, but it is something which should be done.
    – Makyen
    Commented Jul 24, 2021 at 16:46
  • @Makyen It may be difficult to query for such cases without them being explicitly pointed out. But if someone does manage to do so, or a concerned member of the public points out one of someone else's cases, such a case should be handled since the user originally requested dissociation.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Jul 24, 2021 at 23:02
  • @SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Given it hadn't been done, I assumed it to be difficult to query to find all users with dissociated post(s) listed in their top Q&A, but it should be fairly easy to query a single individual's posts to find the posts which are still theirs (i.e. all questions/answers which are not disassociated, which are the contents of what that user's top questions/answers should be). With that information it should be possible to either remove any which shouldn't be in the list, or just set the list to what it should be. That's why I suggested running a batch job over every user.
    – Makyen
    Commented Jul 25, 2021 at 3:56
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    Afaik the number of affected users for this bug is extremely small, even compared to the number of disassociations we've ever processed. I've spent some time trying to think of a query that was even just limited to people who have disassociations attached to their account, but it's rather difficult to do. We don't exactly record disassociations in a sane way that makes doing things with them programmatically a breeze (something many of us have complained about in the past). Running a process for all users would be a massive waste of resources to catch a hand full of cases. :/
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Jul 25, 2021 at 4:04
  • Would cases where a concerned member of the public contacts the team about one such case be handled? I think it should be, since dissociation is a legal process with legal implications, much like normal users reporting underage users.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Jul 25, 2021 at 16:25
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    @Sonic Sure, I don't see why not. It only takes like 10 seconds to process one.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Jul 25, 2021 at 16:38
  • @animuson this also appears to be a problem for posts that are deleted. They still show up in the list, but are not useful in any way. Perhaps these lists need to be rebuild from time to time, instead of being so heavily cached? meta.stackexchange.com/questions/379545/…
    – Luuklag
    Commented Jun 15, 2022 at 9:00
  • @Luuklag That appears to be an unrelated bug where answers to deleted questions are just not getting removed at all. I don't believe there is any manual action we can perform to fix that. Requires an actual fix.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Jun 16, 2022 at 5:26

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