Handling forum posts with deleted accounts/GDPR
 

Hi friends, I run a community site... we have forums on the site where members can post messages. Some members like to post selfies there (which is fine), or similar personal info.

I am trying to figure out a couple of things and would love to hear y'alls 2c.

1. What is a good way to deal with forum posts when members delete their accounts? If I just delete all posts from that member, it will leave holes in the topics and be confusing. My forum software lets me "anonymize" a user attached to all forum posts, so all the posts stay in place but the username/avatar associated with the post are changed to something like @anon124812.

I like the idea of leaving posts in place, and I think I could change my TOS to carve out an exception to allow for this-- something like "when your account is deleted, your personal information will be removed from the site, and the account name and information associated with your forum posts will also be removed, but the content of your posts will remain on the site." I have no idea if this is legal, viable, a good idea, etc... it's just one idea I had.


2. More importantly, under GDPR, the scenario above seems to fail when I get a GDPR "forget me" request. If a user has posted selfies (for example), even if their forum account was anonymized, it's clearly still their personal material (their picture) on the public forums. So I'd need to delete those as well, no?


I hope you can see the situation I'm describing and would love to hear y'alls thoughts... especially if you have forums, and how you handle this!

Thank you-

Eric


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GDPR seems to be a paper tiger at this point.

Re question #1: you only get a license for stuff they post. They get the right to delete.

If you want to hang on to their content, you have to compensate them

You should respect the user’s wishes. If they just delete their account, anonymous username is fine. However, if a user specifically requests that something is deleted, you’d be wise to delete it.

Forums tend to work on the basis that content is owned by the poster.

Can you not annomize user name and run script automagically to remove any [IMG] [/IMG] tags within anonymized poosts?