[unemployable]

Yeah that is the main problem with not using soft deletes. The question is though, if you delete a user, should the user's personal information still exist in your database, or does that violate some kind of privacy regulations? The idea of the deleted user's table is that it can be kept around and then pruned after x number of days to satisfy both privacy and undeleting. To keep the references around, I think one way might be to create two tables, so one table is used for all of the references and it stays around, and the other one gets deleted. Eg Account and User tables, or something.