9: Hotel California
"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
On rare occasions, board members decide to leave the board and ask C&F Moderators to delete their accounts and/or purge their posts. We've declined to do that, particularly for a member who has posted extensively. The nature of a thread consists of posts, responses to posts, the quoting of posts, responses and quotes of responses and so on. If there were technically a way to erase these posts with the push of a button, many threads would be rendered incomprehensible.
It is technically possible to delete an account, although it is rarely done except to spam registrants. When an account is deleted, every post stays on the board, but the name shown reverts to "Guest." If a member has posted extensively, this would yield an archive which would include lots of posts by a mysterious "Guest," which we don't think is a good thing especially because if two or more people who have posted a lot ask for deletion, all of those posts would sort of be fused together under this one mysterious "Guest." For obvious reasons we think this is detrimental to the Board, so requests for this will also be declined.
There is a limited time available to members after initial posting to delete their own posts (
see #16). C&F Moderators will not do this for you by request, either before or after the expiry of this initial period, although posts may occasionally be deleted or amended in any way if they breach board guidelines, or as the Moderators see fit.
So, the Hotel California analogy is a little rough. You can check out, you can leave, but we're not going to tear up the paper trail associated with you being in the Hotel.
So. Welcome to the Hotel California.