Posting this because the original Low thread has disappeared 
Clearly it’s right for users to have the right to be forgotten, but is there any way to avoid a whole thread being nuked when their account is nuked? I know it’s happened before - I guess I just felt particularly sad as the thread was a sort-of DiS “tribute to Mimi Parker” in parts.
This is the link to the thread in question, if that makes finding it any easier. I have no idea how feasible this sort of thing is though.
The mods/admin can transfer ownership of the user’s threads to ‘deleted user’ but it has to be requested before the account goes I think.
Hope [user] is ok.
Edited by admin
Exactly this. We can transfer ownership of soecific threads upon request but obviously we can’t go through a user’s entire post history each time someone wants an account deletion, and it’s not something we can change around after the fact. In this case the user in question made it very clear that they wanted all trace of them gone from this website so it didn’t really come up.
Could there be a standard [automated ideally] process to reassign large threads to the most frequent poster (who isn’t the leaving user)?
We have @deleted_user set up for this kind of thing, but we can’t very well keep people’s posts around without their consent in any case.
Ah I thought maybe you could transfer ownership of the thread, delete only the departing user’s posts but the rest of the thread would remain - but maybe that doesn’t work as the OP would disappear along with the title?
Yeah I get that. I guess maybe like @Octobadger suggested, you could go into their “Top Topics” or whatever it’s called and see if there’s anything particularly big in there. Clearly that’s not going to work if the OP has a bunch of personal, identifying information in it, but in this case the Low thread just had a bunch of tour dates.
IDK, I do get it and I know you’re all doing this voluntarily, so I wouldn’t want to create layers or work (or make things unnecessarily difficult for people who might want to leave in a hurry)
Afraid not — if the OP is deleted, the whole thread goes.
We do normally do this 
Edited to add:
Listen, I don’t normally go into the whys and hows of account deletions, for many (hopefully onvious) reasons. In this case the user in question was too busy arguing for why everyone on here is an antisemite for this kind of issue to even come close to being addressed. I get that it’s a bummer that popular/resourceful threads have just vanished, but at least this isn’t likely to become a recurring issue — we normally enter into a dialogue with anyone requesting account deletion to look at all options (including full anonymisation without deleting any posts, deleting the user account but transferring ownership of significant threads, etc) and this is the only instance I’ve ever been involved in where I’ve not deemed that a useful approach to at least try for.
Again, I really don’t normally go into these details of account deletion requests and can’t see many other cases where I would even consider it, but I hear your concerns and I want to assure you that this was a one-off case and not something that’s going to happen very often.
Hope that makes sense.
That makes perfect sense, thank you. I didn’t realise how much work normally goes into it, and I can understand the process you had to go through in this case. Sounds tough to handle - hope you’re all okay.
Oh jeez. Sad about the Low thread but can see how that wouldn’t come up in that sort of situation.
oh shit, really? I haven’t been in that thread for ages
fuck.
Oh no has [user] gone?? That’s a shame.
Edited by admin
It was a shame, then I read WR’s post…
Yeah, thought they were one of the good guys. Oh well.