Unsubscribe for the user

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peopleopinion
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by peopleopinion »

Kevin Clark wrote:I think it's dangerous for users to be able to self delete.
May I ask what is this danger?
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KevC
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by KevC »

Because they can screw up the flow of a topic if their posts are removed without you knowing about it in advance. It's better to just deactivate an account and leave the posts where they are with their name on.
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by D@ve »

Kevin wrote:It's only one click to deactivate an account anyway
It's also one click to delete a posting, nevertheless the users have the option to delete their posts.

I fully agree wit peopleopinion. This feature should be customizable by the admin. He should be able to decide if the account will be deleted, deleted with posts, or just deactivated.

But imo the User should be able to delete his account.

regards, Dave
2jesus.de - (german community for bible & faith)
phpBB.de - the German support community for pbpBB
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peopleopinion
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by peopleopinion »

Kevin Clark wrote:Because they can screw up the flow of a topic if their posts are removed without you knowing about it in advance. It's better to just deactivate an account and leave the posts where they are with their name on.
I have already gave a solution for this:
peopleopinion wrote:
Master_Cylinder wrote:No, it doesn't benefit every board, which is why so few would actually enable it. It has the potential to ruin a board. Suppose an active member with 10,000+ posts, including tutorials, how-to, support and lengthy discussions on various topics including pictures gets angry and decides to "take his ball and go home" so he deleted everything. That's not a benefit.

If a user wants to delete his own posts or topics can do it now too, without any further new feature in the phpbb core.
In fact as you probably know, there already is in the ACP an option that allows the user to delete or not his own posts (one by one). Cause I don't think that is a problem, because in the same manner, the admin will have into the ACP some option to configure the self unsubscribe /delete account feature.

For example (into the ACP):


Allow user to delete his own account: y | n
Allow user to choose to delete his posts when deletes his own account: y | n
Etc...


Every one of us is here to give the "phpbb ideas" forum new ideas to compare, with the aim to find the better solution to implement new features or improve existing ones into phpbb cms core etc that is used by a lot of people in the world. Everyone can change his mind comparing ideas here...

Considering the suggestion of D@ve, options could be:
Allow user to delete his own account: y | n
Allow user to choose to delete his posts when deletes his own account: y | n
Allow user to deactivate his own account: y | n
Allow user to choose to hide his posts when deactivates his own account: y | n


This will give to admins the freedom to choose what will be possible to do, accordingly to their Country or their tastes or forum needs.
Please explicate why you voted negative or positive, so it will be possible to better understand each one's point of view.
Please visit and vote my website and express freely your opinion on it (phpbb ver.: 3.0.12):
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Thanks. Best Regards, peopleopinion.
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KevC
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by KevC »

D@ve wrote:It's also one click to delete a posting, nevertheless the users have the option to delete their posts.
Only until a reply is posted, then they can't because it would mess up the topic flow.

Pick any topic out of the board and see if it would make sense if one users posts were removed. There's also a danger people can delete themselves by mistake, no matter how many screens say 'are you sure'.
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by peopleopinion »

Kevin Clark wrote:
D@ve wrote:no matter how many screens say 'are you sure'?.
:idea: This issue is very easy to solve with a bit of fantasy. Look at the following feature:
"Your account will be deleted | deactivated within 24h. If you want to undo the deletion | deactivation login and undo it in your User Control Panel..."
Please explicate why you voted negative or positive, so it will be possible to better understand each one's point of view.
Please visit and vote my website and express freely your opinion on it (phpbb ver.: 3.0.12):
http://peopleopinion.altervista.org
Thanks. Best Regards, peopleopinion.
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KevC
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by KevC »

That's just adding levels and levels of more code and more complexity that has to be written, checked, supported and maintained, for an option that hardly ever gets requested.

Don't let them do it. Simple.
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by peopleopinion »

Kevin Clark wrote:That's just adding levels and levels of more code and more complexity that has to be written, checked, supported and maintained, for an option that hardly ever gets requested.

Don't let them do it. Simple.
I don't want to appear polemic but how many times do users click on the option "disable bbcode" down the text area used for writing responses?
And "disable smilies"?
And "Do not automatically parse URLs"?
Or "Delete all board cookies"?
Etc...
Please explicate why you voted negative or positive, so it will be possible to better understand each one's point of view.
Please visit and vote my website and express freely your opinion on it (phpbb ver.: 3.0.12):
http://peopleopinion.altervista.org
Thanks. Best Regards, peopleopinion.
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KevC
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by KevC »

They are simple factors affecting the post contents, not things that need to remove a ton of information from the database and affect the continuity of the board. And they already exist, as does the ability to deactivate an account.

And they get used more than you think.
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by peopleopinion »

Kevin Clark wrote:They are simple factors affecting the post contents, not things that need to remove a ton of information from the database and affect the continuity of the board. And they already exist, as does the ability to deactivate an account.

And they get used more than you think.
:| Maybe.

Of course I have a little experience: my website, based on phpbb cms as you can see, has about 500 posts, few more. Of course they are really few compared with a huge site as phpbb.com is.
At the moment there is none msg where someone used those options: statistically speaking 0/500~.
While for user self deletion | deactivation I can cite a lot of websites that have activated such features starting from some big ones (facebook and google).
Well almost 80% of the web site I use have one or both of these possibilities, a part phpbb based forums and few others in which I'm registered in.

Here viewtopic.php?f=436&t=2190274&start=15#p13476376 I responded to another user for a question a bit similar if you want to read my opinion about.
Please explicate why you voted negative or positive, so it will be possible to better understand each one's point of view.
Please visit and vote my website and express freely your opinion on it (phpbb ver.: 3.0.12):
http://peopleopinion.altervista.org
Thanks. Best Regards, peopleopinion.
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by D@ve »

Don't let them do it. Simple.
We have a forum about religion. Very emotional topic...
For us this is a huge issue. We have one team member ecpacially for de- and reactivitating account. And this is a very annoying job. I'm working on a mod for this problem but in my opinion this is such an essential basic function.

I don't understand why you are fighting this idea so passionately. This is programmed in a day or so. The efford is almost zero since everything is already there.
- deleting users with posts
- deleting users without posts
- deactivating users (and maybe move them to a group)

Actually we just need an UCP module and a switch for the Admin to set if (and how) the user is allowed to delete/deavtivate his own account.
There's also a danger people can delete themselves by mistake, no matter how many screens say 'are you sure'.
You can remove the whole database by mistake... A lot of things can happen by mistake. But thats a risk I'm willing to take.
And as I said: We Actually never delete users, we just deavtivate them and move them to a group.

Its completely unreasonable to forbit users to delete their account other forum software have this "feature" (but as I said, imo its not a "feature" its a matter of course).

regards, Dave
2jesus.de - (german community for bible & faith)
phpBB.de - the German support community for pbpBB
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KevC
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by KevC »

D@ve wrote: I don't understand why you are fighting this idea so passionately.
Because I don't believe it should be a built in function, for the reasons I stated. Deactivation, yes, but not deletion.

Can you imagine the mess you would have if a user with 20,000 posts had a hissyfit decided to delete themselves? First would would probably get a database timeout or memory exhaustion that would take the board down. Then, from experience looking at spammed boards with only a few hundred rogue posts, you would have topic titles with deleted content but without associated ID corrections so the topics would no longer open. No thanks.

Your circumstances for wanting it are quite atypical of most boards, I would think.
D@ve wrote:You can remove the whole database by mistake... A lot of things can happen by mistake.
We see similar things on this site every day so minimising the catastrophic mistakes a user can make would be better.
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by D@ve »

Can you imagine the mess you would have if a user with 20,000 posts had a hissyfit decided to delete themselves?
Yes I'm well aware of that. I had that situation, that a user with a couple of thousand posts "deleted" them bei just editing every single post and changed it to "deleted". Since he started with his oldest posts, it was to late as we recognized it (he must have spend days)...
We see similar things on this site every day so minimising the catastrophic mistakes a user can make would be better.
It must be the choice of the admin! It's also the choice of the admin to allow editing posts.

Why do admins let the user choose his own password? It would be much safer to generate a safe random pasword and would prevent a lot of missuse? Its freedom.

There a hundrets of examples where missuse could be acoided by restricting users (even in phpBB). I believe in the freedom of choice, and its simply wrong not to implement a feature because someone could missuse it.

And missuse could be prevented very easily by the mentioned features.

regards, Dave
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phpBB.de - the German support community for pbpBB
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by peopleopinion »

D@ve, Kevin Clark

IMHO it is very hard if even impossible to convince someone to embrace one opinion if has a deep different experience.
This is because in life exists freedom. This is because in phpbb exist options.

Anyway In my opinion it's not possible to understand how an admin can arrogate to him/herself the right to "force" users to stay registered / subscribed in a website/forum.
But everyone is free to have his/her own opinion: in some places in this world freedom is optional too.

As we have already proposed options could be for example:
Allow user to delete his own account: y | n
Allow user to choose to delete his posts when deletes his own account: y | n
Allow user to deactivate his own account: y | n
Allow user to choose to hide his posts when deactivates his own account: y | n
Allow user to anonymize his/her posts deleting | hiding own account and transferring owned posts to anonymous/guest user.
Another option could permit to delay such operations for a certain nr of hours/days so users can better reflect what they are going to do and eventually recover the old state just logging into the board within the delay time.
And eventually others options to better setup the behavior of that feature and improve security.

If such options are deactivated by default and if there are some necessary tips at the bottom of them that explicate risks of activating them, every admin can choose or not to activate with the conscience of risks.

Anyway, as I said before, in some countries there are some rules, laws that obligate to have links or options or something to unsubscribe/unregister from sites or mailing lists etc.
Even facebook or google and others that know differences between countries laws, allow users to self delete his own account. That's a fact.
In general the freedom of a person stops where starts the freedom of the neighìbor, as well as the freedom of an admin or a whole web site stops where starts the freedom of the user. Freedom is a human right. Remember it. Ever. Laws recognise this fact.

In conclusion this feature is a must have or phpbb is not usable over there.

Also phpbb cms users can ask to staff to be deleted. But why give to staff this task is still a mystery for me despite Kevin explications. In fact it is enough to set correctly above options (and eventually others) to better setup how a user can act to achieve this task without risks and without entrust this boring task to staff that usually has more important and interesting and not automatable things to do.

Because this is a huge post, if there is something I miss or some mistakes in my English or something that offends anyone I'm sorry for this, its not my aim. But in case ask to me explications, I'll try to respond explicating better my point of view.

Thanks everybody for reading patiently.
Please explicate why you voted negative or positive, so it will be possible to better understand each one's point of view.
Please visit and vote my website and express freely your opinion on it (phpbb ver.: 3.0.12):
http://peopleopinion.altervista.org
Thanks. Best Regards, peopleopinion.
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D@ve
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Re: Unsubscribe for the user

Post by D@ve »

IMHO it is very hard if even impossible to convince someone to embrace one opinion if has a deep different experience.
Yes... I think the problem is, that most Admins here come from a technical background. They are running boards about IT, computers or other technical background.

In these kind of forum you register and if you don't bother any more you just stay away from the board.

BUT if you have a forum about emotional topics as religion, politics (sometimes even cars) it is completley different. Some people there get pi**ed off VERY quickly if others don't share their opinion. They write big long whiny martyr Post (or PN to the admin), where they complain that everybody is stupid, and noone understands them etc. etc. - I guess everyone of you knows this kind of user. But in a technical forum this is not that common. In a forum with an emotional topic you have this on a daily base.

I run a forum for musicians since 2002. Since then I deleted about 5 Users that didn't want their account.
In my forum about christianity we sometomes have 3 Users per day that want to be deleted. And the worst part is: After three weeks, the same people come back: "Sorry, I've reconsidered, please reactivate my account"
And as I said: We have a team member who is just manageing the delete stuff.

I know that you this is hard to follow, since you don't have this kind of problems in boards with non-emotinoal topics. But please understand, that it is a big issue for some of us.
Anyway In my opinion it's not possible to understand how an admin can arrogate to him/herself the right to "force" users to stay registered
*fullack* here in Germany it was a big discussion about "unsubscribing" from facebook. People where annoyed since they didn't finde the delete-Button (imo they were right). Privacy and "informational self-determination" is a big issue here.

regards, Dave
2jesus.de - (german community for bible & faith)
phpBB.de - the German support community for pbpBB
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