Topic on Project:Support desk

Please add a account deletion procedure!

6
2601:E:CC00:23:8A53:2EFF:FEEC:12BA (talkcontribs)

Please add a account deletion procedure!

Florianschmidtwelzow (talkcontribs)

MediaWiki itself is not made to delete user accounts of some users. User accounts (logged in (with usernames) or not (with IP's)) are central in the daily wiki usage. The Username/ID is connected with revisions of pages, used in discussions and so on. It's no trivial to delete a user correctly, so there is no feature in core and no working extension (iirc). You can use Extension:UserMerge to merge users. So you can use it to delete user accounts, e.g. when you merge account XY with a pseudo user account "Anonymous". All contributions will be attributed to this user account, without any chance to revert this action!

AKlapper (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Please provide a usecase for it. :) When somebody has made an edit and then the account is deleted, how should that be displayed?

88.130.69.198 (talkcontribs)

That is e.g. useful to delete accounts of spammers. Anyway: What he is asking for technically is already possible - no need to invent something new...

Florianschmidtwelzow (talkcontribs)
88.130.69.198 (talkcontribs)

Yeah, it depends: If the spammer has only created new pages, then I usually use this maintenance script, which allows to completely delete pages. This makes the user account unused in the sense of the removeUnusedAccounts.php script. Anyway, if the spammer changed "good" pages, which you do not want to delete just because a spammer put his junk into them, then the spammer's account will not be unused in that sense - and in this case I merge the junk into one "junk account" (the Anonymous account).

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