Two issues here, just looping you guys in if you had input:

1. Users currently can't disable their own accounts. I think we should definitely implement this feature, the only technical trick is that I think it needs email verification to avoid prank-disables when you leave your screen unlocked and such. This is reversible by an administrator so it doesn't need to be super guarded.
   • A subfeature here is that we don't have a "never send me any email" flag anywhere, but probably should for open source installs like ours.
2. Actual deletion, where we destroy data associated with the account.

For actual deletion, I have a few thoughts:

• I think we should permit this if we reasonably can. Users often voice concerns about the difficulty of deleting their Facebook accounts (it's not especially difficult, but it's not anywhere on normal flows) and about what happens when data is actually deleted, e.g., and I think these are reasonable concerns for them to have. I'm personally very frustrated when I have to email account service to delete an account. Comcast is the worst, where you have to call them and wait on hold for like an hour on their special "we will never answer this call" line. Our users are also mostly adults, and probably have a lower rate of regret than Facebook users.
• That said, I'm not sure what data we could actually delete. It seems like we fairly clearly should not delete any shared objects the user created (revisions, tasks, wiki pages, etc.). We can delete their account itself and other user data (their profile, their emails, their foreign accounts). I'm not sure if this would be satisfactory or not. I'm not sure how much more data we can really delete.

@wkilian - in your case, what is your motivation for wanting to delete your account? Do you just want to clean it up? Make sure you don't get any emails? Make sure we don't do anything funky with linked accounts like GitHub/Facebook/Google?

And what do you expect to happen when your account is deleted (for example, would you expect this task to be deleted too)? Would removing just your account and credentials (emails, external logins, etc) be satisfactory?

I agree with your summary. I think people sign up on Phabricator, want to test for 10 minutes, then erase all trails, which we don't offer. It's a larger issue for us than other open source installs. Still, should be supported.

We're basically in agreement. However, I think we want to do T331 to handle the very common case Chad points out. I also think T1205 will be helpful here for the other next most common case - "I just want to see what's going on and don't intend to interact more."

After that, I don't think there should be much account deletion going on...? This should be nice because I agree with Evan that we can't delete most data since its shared.

I also worry about delete -> re-create scenarios. I think those end up being more common... I think we can let people shoot themselves in their feet as it were, but I don't want to have to spend time supporting foot wounds. What a great analogy.

Yes please allow user deletion of their account. I came across the site thinking it was a new found project management tool and now I am getting emails on topics. Please delete my account if you will. "RetailIngenuity"

If you create a task, we will send updates on that task to you, unless you have turned those preferences off.