Wish to close your account?

[relentlessflame]

Every once in a while, we receive a request from a member who wishes to close their Forum account. This is possible, but we need to clarify a few important things:

1. Please do not create a new thread to make the request
   Our Forum Rules forbid "farewell threads", so we ask instead that you contact us via Forum Support. If you wish to say goodbye to other forum members first, please do so via PM or VM prior to contacting an Administrator.
   
   
2. We will not mass-delete all your old threads/posts
   This is because doing so could cause chaos to the threads you participated in, and will not remove any post content that was quoted in other people's posts anyway. In many cases, you can delete your own posts, but this will again not remove quotes in posts by other posters.
   
   
3. We will not mass-delete your related Forum data
   This includes PMs, VMs, Albums, User Profile Data, and any contributions you made to Social Groups or other parts of the site. Again, you can delete or overwrite much of this data on your own, but it will still be preserved on our server in some cases.
   
   
4. We will not delete your account
   We can deactivate your account to block you from logging-in, but your account will continue to exist in our system for historical reasons.
   
   We can optionally rename your account to a random handle if requested, however this will not remove the reference to your account name in any quotes throughout posts or other historical content on the site. References to your handle and your posts may thus still appear in Google and other search engines. Changing your handle also creates the possibility that someone else could register for the site using your old handle name and try to impersonate you, so this may not be advisable in some cases.
   
   We can also optionally overwrite your E-mail address to a random/invalid address, which would effectively prevent any possibility of your account being reactivated at a later date.
   
   
5. Please only contact us if you're sure
   If we close your account, we take that to mean that you are leaving the forum permanently. You will not be permitted to create a new account with a different handle, as this is forbidden by our Forum Rules. Closing your account should not be used as a sort of temporary "away" status. If you've recently been put through a difficult situation and are upset or frustrated, please consider waiting a day or two to give yourself time to think it over. (We'd also encourage you to report any such situation to the moderators to give us a chance to resolve the dispute, if possible.)

Given the aforementioned points, the only real benefit in "closing your account" is that it prevents it from ever being used to login, unless you contact us later from the assigned Email address to request to have it reactivated. (Abuse of the closure/reactivation process could result in sanctions being applied to your account.) An alternative to account closure would, of course, be to simply not login to the site again. You can also change the Email and password on your account, which could be another way of effectively making it impossible to use.

If you still wish for us to close your account, please proceed as mentioned in the first point above and contact us via Forum Support. If you contact us, we will assume that you have already read and understood these points, and we may proceed to deactivate your account without any additional confirmation.