Let someone deactivate their account

I agree that you should be able to close your launchpad user account. There should be an option on your "edit my details" page to do just that.

Thanks for reporting this.

A script now exists that purges what we can of an account, including all personal information (except what they left in their bug comments etc.). This can be run by special request by the DBA or a sysadmin.

Having seen the number of people who choose 'permanently remove this account' on the wikis and then want them to be recovered, it would be unwise for us to enable this easily from the web ui.

We still need to document that removal is possible somewhere users can find, and spell out the process (support request on Launchpad probably). I don't think it should be too easy to find though, as account removal adversely affects other users. eg. Bug comments left by now-removed accounts is confusing and allows no way of contacting the author if necessary, branches disappearing causes annoyance and possibly data loss, bugs owned by a now uncontactable and invalid account, etc. I don't think 'going home and taking your ball with you' should be encouraged when most users would be quite happy with just setting their email address to hidden, toggling the (as yet not implemented) "don't email me anything" flag and forgetting about it.

-> High, because it's aggravating, and we will soon get an influx of people trying out Launchpad for the first time.

I think all that remains doing on this is creating a wiki page documenting the account removal process (open a support ticket on Launchpad), and why you really don't want to do it. This page should be pointed to from the Launchpad UI somewhere, possibly the FAQ.

Open a support ticket? I think it needs to be much easier than that (taking minutes, not days/weeks).

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Open a support ticket? I think it needs to be much easier than that
> (taking minutes, not days/weeks).

Minutes means automatic removal, and we don't want that. If support tickets
are taking too long to resolve, that is an issue with the support tracker.
Without the support ticket, we need to manually confirm a) what email
address the user registered as, or their login name (so far almost all
requests have neglected this info) and b) confirm the user has access to the
given account by probing their email addresses and getting them to respond.
This is the slow approach.

--
Stuart Bishop <email address hidden> http://www.canonical.com/
Canonical Ltd. http://www.ubuntu.com/

Why don't we want automatic removal? Perhaps we're talking about different things. I'm talking about something that would make people happy that Launchpad was no longer claiming they were a user (and would reassure them that Launchpad wouldn't send them any more e-mail messages), but that would still be reversible if they changed their mind six months later.

I have also been trying to figure out how to remove/delete/unsubscribe my account for some time now...

I am tired of the bug report emails that I receive, and have to delete everyday.
I thought I was helping the community by sending in a bug report, but now it has become a daily annoyance.
Right now I am being nice by just deleting them, but I will soon be setting up email filters and reporting them as spam if it continues.
If anybody figures out how to resolve the issue, please let the rest of the community know how to unregister/remove/delete/unsubscribe, I am sure they would appreciate it as much as I would.

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I've been trying to figure out how to delete my Launchpad account for *months*!

And you don't want it to be "too easy"??

Do it! Or tell *me* how to do it! NOW!!

Oh yeah -- and *don't* tell me to e-mail a sysop or an admin. I've tried that *multiple* times and each one has bounced back.

Alan,

The best way to ask for an account removal is to post a request for it in the Launchpad Answer Tracker:
https://launchpad.net/launchpad/+addquestion

I would like us to do a first step in this, which is to allow people to close their accounts trivially if they are not owners of anything. Basically replacing the action Tom is currently performing with some minimal UI -- we can tackle the more complicated parts incrementally.

I /do/ require that we offer the person an optional textarea that allows them to explain why they want their account closed, and if there's anything else they want to say before saying goodbye.

Pushing off one notch because of SSO work.

Although it's unlikely that bug/spec assignees will close their accounts I think we need to take that into account. So, should we reassign bugs/specs assigned to the account we're closing?

Should we do the same for projects/project-groups/teams registered by the user?

And branches?

Reassigning all of those things to nobody seems sensible to me.

Well, "nobody" means different things depending on the context -- many of our owner attributes aren't nullable. So project owner nobody actually means "registry".

I think we should tell the user what we are going to do as part of the confirmation page. Something like:

  You will be unassigned from the following bugs:
     - Bug 232: Launchpad stole my lunch money
     - Bug 666: Christopher Walken is my dad

  The following projects you own will be reassigned to the Registry administrators:
     - Gnomebaser
     - The Turk Turk process

  Your membership will be removed from the following teams:
     - Ubuntu Treacle Team
     - The Pixel Loins Team

  (( I don't care just get me outta here ))

Something like that.

Re-targeting to 1.1.8, salgado had to work on more urgent stuff for 1.1.7

fixed in RF 4671

Maybe the person's name should also be hidden, replaced by just something like "Deleted Account." While it remains, Launchpad is still going to tend to show up in web searches for that person, and it looks like we're being recalcitrant.

The person has the ability to change their name anyhow. We can't force them to use their real name. Therefore it would be gracious, once they do leave, to hide it.

Similarly on the person page, just say "This person no longer uses Launchpad."

You can leave the userid so they can be distinguished.

Bug 407189 for that.