[Shog9]

FWIW, I personally scheduled his account for deletion weeks ago; not sure why it wasn't removed, other than that the system thought he canceled the deletion (which we allow, because deletion is permanent).

We're working with him now to figure out what happened.

[vonklaus]

Out of curiosity, not hostility, why can a user not delete their own account? Why is there no obvious account option that says 'permanently delete account' which would remove a user from the site? All the content would still be there, the user would simply lose the ability to create more content and make edits?

[Shog9]

Short answer: most users can do exactly that.

There's an automated process that confirms the request via email and starts a timer that, if not cancelled, removes the account. For accounts with a non-trivial number of posts we hold them for manual confirmation just to prevent unfortunate accidents (there's no undo - more on that next) but all it involves is an affirmative response from an email associated with the account.

The longer answer is... This is one of those very early design decisions that, in hindsight, was probably sub-optimal. Ideally, account deletion would amount to nothing more than flipping a bit on a database record, at least in the short term - if someone regretted their decision a day later, no harm done; just flip it back. But things are not ideal, and deleting an account actually purges rather a lot of information that can't easily be restored - so given that a non-trivial number of users do change their minds (especially those with a long history of activity that will be lost), it's worth everyone's time to make double-sure before hitting the big red button.

We've slowly been improving the process over the past few years, but it's still no where near ideal from anyone's perspective. I could go into more detail, but... Can sum it up with, "We're now only wasting ridiculous amounts of time on this instead of utterly insane amounts of time".

[bramgg]

I love when action is taken after people write successful blog posts.

[Shog9]

Protip: if you really want prompt action taken, just write what you need in the email and leave it at that. The folks doing support for stuff like this handle hundreds of emails a day, and every time we need to wait for a reply from someone before proceeding that's gonna slow everything down.

Blog posts are always fun, and certainly brighten up what is otherwise a dreadfully boring task, but... not really the best way to get action if that's all you're after.