Users should be able to close accounts on specific SE sites without developer/moderator intervention

Question

I am fully aware of the process to close an account, but with the amount of new SE sites popping up under certain circumstances users may want to close or remove their accounts from one or more SE sites. Just because a user is a member of one site does not mean they have to be a member of every site. For example:

• A user joins a community and realises they no longer want to be part of it.
• A user accidentally joins a community but will never be active in it.

However, I do think there need to be some requirements before a user can self delete:

• Must have less than a certain amount of reputation on the site to be able to delete their account. This should prevent high reputation users from just deleting account at a whim. Possibly a min and max limit, for example between 100 - 1000 reputation.
• Must be a member of the site for a more than a week to prevent sock puppet accounts for example.
• All questions and answers are unlinked from the account as per the current method.
• All votes made by the user are nullified to prevent abuse by creating sock puppet accounts.
• Has to have a registered account, not a cookie based account.

There are potentially more requirements and reasons that could be added, however the process should not require any developer or moderator intervention and should be available to a user via their user profile page if they are eligible.

Clarification

The criteria given above are only suggestions, and by no means the final set of requirements to be able to do this if at all. I respect that some disagree with this but some users do not necessarily want to have 15 accounts with 101 reputation sitting everywhere. It's a personal choice.

Answer 1

Editor's note: For a while now, this request has been fully implemented. If you don't meet the criteria below, you can still request deletion through your profile. This will start a 24-hour timer, and once it expires your account will be deleted. You can freely cancel the timer before it expires.

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It is possible to self-delete your account (and has been possible for at least a few months), provided you haven't contributed very much on the site at all:

• cannot have more than one post
• cannot have voted more than once
• cannot have a post with more than one upvote
• cannot have a bounty active

The link to delete your account, if you meet the above criteria, is on the user settings page.

Answer 2

• Must be a member of the site for a more then a week.

What's the point of this restriction? I don't think it should be enforced.

Answer 3

This seems like overkill...

• You can already clear out your profile, just by clearing all the fields and changing your display name to "anon" or some such.
• You can already clear all associations between an account and accounts on other SE sites. - this isn't currently possible anymore; that sorta throws a wrench in this.

...once done, most users will have no way of identifying you. Moderators can still see your openID (I assume...), so I suppose they could track you back to other sites that way, but... They can probably do that anyway. I suppose the site could help automate this - give you a "clear" button or something.

The only other thing I can think of that someone deleting their account might want would be deleting content - comments and (unaccepted) answers could be removed, as well as questions that don't have up-voted answers. Again, the sites could automate this, but they probably shouldn't - that just encourages a sort of RAGEQUIT / take your ball and go home attitude.

...speaking of which, the only interesting things your proposed feature adds are cleared votes, cleared reputation, and cleared OpenID. So a user who deletes his account in a fit of rage after someone criticizes his answer now can't do anything to get it back the next day when he's cooled down and realizes that his answer did kinda suck.

I donno... Making it easier for impulsive users to shoot themselves in the feet doesn't seem like much of a feature.

Answer 4

• Must have less than 1000 reputation on the site.

Whats the point of this? Are you assuming 1k+ users will always stay active and like the site (strictly going by your reasons)?

Answer 5

I'm not sure what's the point of this. Are you ashamed of your contributions? Maybe it bothers you not having or caring to get 20k reps on every SE site you are on?

Accounts do not cost anything to create and keep. I really don't see why you would bother deleting user accounts -- not wanting to spend 12 hours/day on each of your accounts is fine, really...

It especially bothers me when you propose to have account deletion followed by a nuke button that clears everything you've done: questions, answers, comments, votes are no longer truly yours once posted, they're the internet's at large.

It is also wrong to assume you can never be useful in a given community - sites overlap, you don't need to be a world expert to ask a question, etc.

I just can't see anything good coming from a StackEchange(tm) ObsessiveCompulsive BridgeBurninator(tm), sorry.