How do you delete users from your website?

1 points by quadhome 12y ago ↗ HN

Heartbleed has got me rotating passwords and deleting stale accounts.

I've found a lot of websites, despite what they say, don't actually delete your account.

For example, Eventbrite appends "deleted-" to your e-mail address and leaves everything exactly the same. You can even log back in!

Deleting accounts and user data is always a frustration. SQL foreign keys being one pain I'm sure many have suffered. On my last project, we just had a "deleted" column.

How is everyone else handling deleting users from your website?

1 comment

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jesusmichael 12y ago ↗

In this day when valid email addy is at a premium I never delete an account.

I have a status field Active/Inactive, when a user goes inactive (over 90 days) I have a process in a cron job that creates a strong password (36 chars) for that account.

Then when an inactive tries to login, my system tells them they have been inactive and must reset their password.