Feedback and suggestions

Thanks for your suggestion.

I understand why this is frustrating for you. Like you say members who leave may be contacting you with their contact information. Which you are then unable to view when accounts are deleted either by our admin team or by the member themselves.

I will say that members who have been banned from FF permanently or via IP (which deletes the account and all site content including messages) are usually only scammers / spam bots. We don't want members being scammed ,which is one reason for the messages being removed and unreadable. Otherwise banning the account has no real affect, and members are left vulnerable by still being able to see and use scam links or contact information.

A genuine member is more likely to delete their account rather than have it permanently or IP banned by our admin team. In this instance, like you say you may need to be able to view their message, especially if it is a parting message with contact information.

We will have to have a think about this as we have to compliant with GDPR and not retain excessive information from deleted accounts.

Having the message viewable in your private email inbox that is linked to your FF account may not be ideal either as this is not guaranteed to be private and secure as it is when viewing the message on the site.

Leave this one with us... We are a community site, and we are here for people to make real connections with other genuine members whether online or in real life. We want to encourage friendships, and relationships that are formed here not hinder it. So I am sure we can think of something that is suitable to put in place.

Thanks again,

c00kie
FF Team

Agreed on the email aspect, which means the burden falls on the FF site to keep private messages readable under suitable circumstances.

There is a third category, into which i fell: 2 year inactivity expiration. Had i known, i might have been more motivated to 1) keep track of time, 2) push through my personal issues to at least do a quick “ping” login to the FF system to keep my account in active status. Given that other sites in our community have other inactive account expiration/deletion policies (or none at all, like Dimensions, where one’s posts are forevaaah), it might be nice to somehow make this expiry policy more obvious (not sure how).

Truly i believe these are 3 wholly different cases, each needing to be handled differently:

1) Scammer permanent/IP ban: delete all content everywhere, as is present policy.

2) Member intentionally deletes their account: GDPR etc. rules. Maybe, if legal, checkboxes in the account deletion process asking:
☐ Preserve my existing Forum posts (for easier thread reading ability)
☐ Preserve my private messages to others (to let them contact me)
☐ Preserve my stories (for others to enjoy)
☐ Preserve my photos (for others to enjoy)
☐ Preserve my videos (for others to enjoy)
Defaults would likely be unchecked (delete these materials), per applicable laws, requiring departing members to consciously override.

3) Account inactivity expiration: default: preserve existing posted to FF user content, even if the account itself vanishes. The user did not explicitly leave. In some jurisdictions this can apparently be legally covered by sign-up contract clauses about the new member hereby granting permission for displaying content in perpetuity or somesuch. If this isn’t legally possible, it would at least be kind and community-spirited to reach out via email to the member:

Made-up example text:


Ever since i started reading the FF forums years ago now, i’ve been repeatedly frustrated trying to follow and understand what’s going on in older parts of a now-revived and again current thread. Sometimes the thread might not even be a week old and the OP is already gone, and/or some critical follow-up posts. Unless someone still active has quoted this material (and using proper trimming protocols, may not have quoted it all), that content and essential context is gone. Other sites in our community don’t have this problem (that i’ve seen), making me want to read and post there, where it’s still possible to follow the whole thread and context.

It might be wise to incorporate a 4th. color dot code for user avatars: account expired (but content remains viewable). No idea what color to use for that. If implemented and understood, this might help minimize people trying to respond to members who are no longer here. They could still do so in Forum threads, but if they try to send a private message they get an “Account expired” or similar error message.

Very glad improvements are being considered. I think a well-thought-out redo of these systems and procedures will make FF a more coherent community.

Thanks for your ideas on this.

I think we should definately send out a warning email before automatically deleting unused accounts. This seems only polite and it's something we've been meaning to do for a while (I'll bump it up on the priorities).

Obviously we want people to be actively using their accounts and don't want them to leave, especially since many members seem to take a break from the site and then return, sometimes years later. Perhaps we could have a 'sleep' option for accounts, where their content remains, but but it's clear to other members that their account is not currently active. This would fit in well with your suggestion about the 'online' indicator. The 'sleeping' member could then return whenever they're ready and their account would be as they left it. This would help with posts being deleted from forum threads, making the thread difficult to read. The sleeping accounts would take a bit of work to implement, so it may be something for the longer term.

It would have made all the difference for me taking action, which would have preserved my fairly many Forum posts of the past, and preserved my Joined xx years cred.

On the other hand, being unexpectedly erased (i had completely forgotten about the FF account expiry policy) urged me into a fresh start in terms of a better user name and newer avatar, so it wasn’t wholly bad.



Interesting idea. I’m wondering how useful it would be. When i go away, it’s typically not intentionally: i’m usually in a depression crisis, or there’s some other life event pulling me away suddenly. Having to remember a sleep option then proactively going to FF to set that option would almost always be so low on my priority list that it would seldom if ever happen—especially because when in a world of hurt, i would not know whether or not i would be coming back ever.

Anyone else? Other opinions on this?

Hopefully the sleep option would be in addition to the 1-3 examples i described above, not instead of. If a member is active here then dies, which does happen and nearly happened to me in 2018 and 2019 (but i wasn’t at the time active here and my account had already expired), what is appropriate for their FF content? Dimensions, which saves everything, puts an In Memoriam text note/flag beneath the person’s avatar and name, to gently let newer members know that there may be wisdom here to read in the person’s legacy posts, but there’s zero point trying to follow up with them. I don’t know what other sites in our community do. I’ve read a number of excellent timeless pearls of wisdom from longstanding members of the greater fatosphere and FF on FF, which newer members will never see if the only option is timed expiry without member action.