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One common use of the "Posts by deleted user" page is investigating vandalism by a deleted user (generally part of a rage-quit), either edits or deletions. If the user doesn't have a lot of posts, that's fine, and we can just open every post in a tab and look at them all. But sometimes, they have a lot:

Posts for deleted user 141302 Showing posts 1 to 100 out of 612

It would be very useful to be able to sort by last activity to find edit vandalism, and deletion date to find delete vandalism.

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  • 2
    As a workaround, you can always find non-deleted posts in SEDE, even after the user is de-normalized.
    – Laurel
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 22:01
  • 13
    Tbh it'd be nice if deleted profiles retained like 90% of the profile page - network profiles, questions, answers, flags, comments, edits, other actions - all useful info, and occasionally needed for a deleted profile.
    – Robotnik
    Commented Aug 21, 2023 at 3:15
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    @Robotnik, Laws such as GDPR mandate to delete personal data upon request. A user account deletion implies deleting its personal data. So, removing the profile content including most of the user activity is quite understandable. (There is also some data that other laws mandate to keep, in which case keeping it takes precedence. But most of the profile content does surely not fall under those other laws.)
    – Frédéric
    Commented Aug 22, 2023 at 21:05
  • @Frédéric I would argue that questions, answers, flags, & edits are not personal data, once you disassociate them from a username/email/IP. But even if we assume that all user contributions ARE covered by GDPR, there's no reason GDPR deletion requests couldn't be handled in a separate process to regular deletion. Sure, the data would be unavailable in GDPR cases, but all the other, regular deletions (spam accounts, trolls, etc) it would be.
    – Robotnik
    Commented Aug 22, 2023 at 23:14
  • @Frédéric Also note that COPPA requests are already handled in this manner - IIRC, the user and all contributions are scrubbed from the site in its entirety. So it's not out of the realm of possibility.
    – Robotnik
    Commented Aug 22, 2023 at 23:16
  • @Frédéric AFAIK, nothing has changed on the mod's dashboard since GDPR is in effect. Mods can still access list of posts (and now even comments) for deleted users. GDPR's erasure request doesn't even delete content, only disassociates them.
    – Meta Andrew T.
    Commented Aug 23, 2023 at 6:05
  • We are doing the design work on updating this page, no ETA yet, but to clarify. Is there a desire for this new column to only show the activity of the deleted user or the last activity by anyone on the post? I assume we are typically only looking at this after vandalism, but there might be other use cases when it makes sense to want to know if any activity has occurred.
    – SpencerG StaffMod
    Commented Sep 26 at 21:05

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