Deleting or deactivating your account?

[Thyroid]

Is this the real life?

Is this just fantasy?

[Thrik]

You big girl's blouse. What you doing that for? In for life, man.

[miffy495]

Kroms! Don't do it! We still love you!

[Roderick]

HOLD ON, SPORT. What's this all about? Point me to the thread where stuff went awry and I'll challenge the wrongdoers in a hearty game of fisticuffs until matters are settled in decisive ways.

[Ben X]

It wasn't the Half Life 3 thread, was it?

[syntheticgerbil]

Nooooooo, not allowed! Don't leave.

[MrHoatzin]

I know it's possible because Sal Limones did it at some point and her posts stayed.

 

Don't go. What did we do?

[Erkki]

I'm guessing you don't want something to be googleable or something of that variety? But if the posts stay then deleting the account doesn't help likely.

[Lu]

I can make it happen... For a price.

[castorp]

Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia, let me go.

[Nachimir]

I'd be sad to see you go Kroms, but totally understand you have your reasons and might not want to share them.

[Roderick]

In all seriousness, if it is what I assume it's about, then it's super sad to see you go, but ultimately your choice and if you feel it's necessary, then... well... damn it.

[Thyroid]

I don't know. It's complicated. It's mostly that I want to...clean-up. For various reasons, personal and otherwise. But also because I feel like I spend too much time online when I'm supposed to be doing stuff. I wish I could talk about it, but it'll just be convoluted and sound insane.

 

Thanks to everyone for the wonderful words, though. I didn't expect that anyone would really care. I'll of course miss this place - not just for the support I got in places like the "Life" thread, but the general friendliness of this forum and all the enlightening discussions you've had, especially the stuff that I was always too lazy to contribute to. And all the David Cage-directed fist-shaking I did that you all politely endured.

 

PS: If deleting my account means the more popular threads I've made get deleted, I'll simply go through my 500+ posts and delete them manually. But still waiting on an answer to the question via PM.

[Jake]

Just talked to Doug -- deleting your account will turn your posts into posts created by a unregistered, unlinked guest users named Kroms, not connected to any particular user account. It is incredibly frustrating from a maintenance/organization OCD standpoint because it means there are a bunch of posts and threads not tied to a user, but it is supported by the forum. It's also way better than you manually deleting 500 posts. ("I've never deleted a non-spam user" says Doug, so this is just an educated guess as to how it will work.)

Alternatively your account can be suspended, which keeps it linked up as a user, but it is officially a dead/archived account which can't be logged into or modified. (I/we'd much rather suspend the account than delete it, so it doesn't splatter the disconnected remnants all over the database, for what it's worth.)

[Thyroid]

Neither of those works for what I want. I guess I'll have to delete the posts manually and politely ask anyone to edit quoted posts I need removed. Thanks, Jake (and Doug).

[Jake]

Please don't do that (yet), for the sake of the forum. Deleting first posts from threads especially is a dangerous/gross thing.

[Thyroid]

I figured as much. I'll just edit them to a ".", so that future readers go about and wonder why this mad user went about putting "." in every other thread.

[Jake]

Your choice to do this to your posts is one of the most simultaneously frustrating/depressing/saddening/annoying things I've ever experienced on this board, btw. Please reconsider.

[Nappi]

What if you just used spoiler tags?

 

 

In all seriousness, though, it's sad to see you go. But you have obviously thought this one through, so good luck with whatever you decide to spend your extra time on from now on!

[Thyroid]

After talking to Jake, it looks like I won't be leaving, or at least not as permanently as I'd thought. I'll have to PM some of you later, asking you to edit stuff of mine you've quoted and that I need removed, if that's OK. This post will be edited too. But yeah, this whole thread is now probably useless for purposes other than me fluffing up my own ego.

[Thrik]

I can't imagine why you'd want to do this, I'll assume it's nothing you want to go into. But if it's because you don't want real-life people knowing what you get up to online, why not just have your username changed so there's no real link people would match up? You could edit out specific particularly incriminating things.

It's important to realise everything you put on the web is somewhat permanent, though. Even if the admins were to obliterate your account and posts, easily-accessible archives will live on forever on the web archive — just like anything else you ever put online.

[Twig]

I have to admit I'm completely baffled by this thread. It's one of the strangest requests I've ever seen. At first I thought you just wanted to leave, which is understandable. People change and want to move on and/or away. But then it was about clearing all evidence of your presence! I'm sure you have your reasons, but I won't lie and say I'm not incredibly curious. (But I also respect your desire to not be open about it, so hey.)

 

At any rate, I hope whatever it is that's happening works out the best for you. U:

[toblix]

Have you tried renaming your account to Smork?

 

edit: In addition to my good joke, I'm also saddened by this thread. Obviously you have some reason for this, but I hope you come up with a solution, like not leaving or at least coming back.

[miffy495]

At first I thought you just wanted to leave, which is understandable. People change and want to move on and/or away. But then it was about clearing all evidence of your presence! I'm sure you have your reasons, but I won't lie and say I'm not incredibly curious. (But I also respect your desire to not be open about it, so hey.)

 

Pretty much this. Very sad to see you go, and erasing the evidence of some things you've said in the past is something I can empathize with. Still, the mystery, she is a tantalizing one. In the end, mostly just sad. You're not just an old guard Thumb, you're a Mixnmojo alum. That forum was the first one I ever registered for (under a different user name) way back when I was 13, and to have (vicariously - internet style) known you for 12 years and see you disappear suddenly is a bummer. All the best in whatever you get up to, man.

[Thrik]

I love internet past, it's such a sweet modern phenomenon. By going through someone's online history you can pretty much watch them evolve from a little shit into a functional adult. For example, on LucasForums (which encompasses Mojo's forums and numerous others) there're thousands of posts I made between the ages of like 12 and 20. It can be a little embarrassing to look at them every now and then, but I love the fact that the history is there. It's almost like being able to see my younger self through a window; not just photos, but an actual view of how I used to think and talk.

 

Mega-services like Facebook and Twitter conglomerate all that history into and even smaller space, for example with Facebook you can instantly skip back to someone's posts on their 'timeline' in 2007, or whenever. Imagine if someone's been using it for about 30 years and you can instantly skip back to all those points in their life, photos and all. That, to me, is brilliant. It's like a baby book of someone's whole life.

 

So yeah, that was a tangent. But the moral is this, Kroms: if this is because you don't want some colleague, boss, girl, or friend seeing your online persona — don't throw away your past for such stupid reasons. If such people would judge you badly for it then maybe they shouldn't be in your life. If there's something more serious than that like you're joining the CIA I apologise, we have no choice but to grandiosely speculate in such circumstances.