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Hey everybody

I haven't used dakka dakka in an awfully long time as my hobbies have shifted and i hardly have any free time, I did however want to use my internet pseudonym for other things and a quick google search of it links to a hefty list of dakka forum posts. I was wondering if there was anyway i could close my account ?, I would greatly appreciate if somebody could help me through this.

C-3

We can lock the account for you, but that's about it.

 reds8n wrote:
We can lock the account for you, but that's about it.

Would that remove the google history ?, or is there a way to perhaps change my name on the forum either would be greatly helpful.

The admin could probably delete your account if you asked nicely enough. Google is harder since it actually indexes web pages.

Pretty much the one 'law of the internet' is don't put something on it you don't want someone to find.

There is absolutely nothing anyone on DakkaDakka can do to fix the problem you are describing (your dakka posts coming up in google searches). Even if your account is completely deleted - something they have said previously they do not like to do - they the threads you created and participated in will still exist, and hence, will still show up in google results. You could ask Google to purge these results, and they would be happy to never bother to respond to you at all, or perhaps they might point you to a forum somewhere full of completely unhelpful non-answers. Take it from me, what you are asking is not going to happen.

That being said, if you want to hide your forum posts from your own google searches, that's a whole different thing and totally possible. Google "ChronoCupcake -dakkadakka.com" to see a list of results which exclude the Dakka Dakka domain.

Alternately, you could google "ChronoCupcake -site dakkadakka.com" if you wished to see ONLY your results on Dakka.

Or you can just make a new pseudonym and start using it. That will be your easiest solution.

Once you are in the Matrix, you can't get out.

 Testify wrote:
The admin could probably delete your account if you asked nicely enough. Google is harder since it actually indexes web pages.

Nah Lego says he doesn't delete accounts since it messes with the database or some techno-wizardry...

I'm not entirely certain as to why you can't just use the name anyway but if it means that much to you you can ask to change your account username.

 purplefood wrote:

Nah Lego says he doesn't delete accounts since it messes with the database or some techno-wizardry...

I have a background in PHP/MySQL so I'd be interested to hear the reasoning behind this.

 Testify wrote:

 purplefood wrote:

Nah Lego says he doesn't delete accounts since it messes with the database or some techno-wizardry...

I have a background in PHP/MySQL so I'd be interested to hear the reasoning behind this.

I have a background in not being Legoburner so you'll have more success asking him rather than me...

I was asking him, just because I quote you doesn't mean I'm asking you a question. Public forum dude

Well we were talking then suddenly we're not.
How am I supposed to keep up with these crazy social rules you keep making up?

If all else fails, you could write a ton of posts on some other site and thereby reduce the number of dakka-links that show up in a search...?

That's what i did to cover up my 'entertainment' career

 purplefood wrote:
That's what i did to cover up my 'entertainment' career

It only worked until they made a movie of your exploits.
.

 Ouze wrote:

 purplefood wrote:
That's what i did to cover up my 'entertainment' career

It only worked until they made a movie of your exploits.
.

I have been discovered!


Saved it.

 Testify wrote:

 purplefood wrote:

Nah Lego says he doesn't delete accounts since it messes with the database or some techno-wizardry...

I have a background in PHP/MySQL so I'd be interested to hear the reasoning behind this.

Here's the non-tech version (from what I understand): Deleting a user results in all their posts being stripped out of the database and all the threads they started also being removed.

Not only does this affect the database negatively because you're talking about potentially affecting a LOT of threads (depending on how active the user was who is being deleted) but in the case of threads where their posts are stripped out, now you have conversations no longer making much sense (as people are replying to posts that aren't there anymore).

I have to agree with Purplefood and Yakface- You're not going to be able to delete the account.

What you can do is ask for your account to be renamed, which would result in the search results eventually changing as the pages are indexed again. On name changing though, I'm not sure that would be possible because of the compound nature of Dakka, which takes several different and complex programs and combines them into a single website. I at least count the forum, MediaWiki, and an image upload program. Your account would be linked into all three, and software developed for changing usernames only does it for one program. This is a problem with Wikimedia wikis (Wikipedia and the associated projects) because when someone requests a username change there, it has to be made on literally every wiki that they visited while logged in, separately. If it can be done, I would say a username change is the way to go.

As to why the user account can't be deleted, it can cause serious malfunctions with the database that can mess up the program. On the forum, you would have huge numbers of posts go missing, which would make many discussions unreadable. Because Dakka uses MediaWiki, your account definitely cannot be deleted, because doing so would cause serious problems. A lot of people want to circumvent that with MediaWiki, and even with "stable" extensions, it's a really bad idea.

I also think that people want to delete accounts and stuff like that far too often. If you don't want to use something, you can always just not use it.

UPDATE forum_posts
SET author=Some_new_user_ID
WHERE author=ChronoCupcake
DELETE FROM users WHERE username=ChronoCupcake

user deleted, database amended, no gaps in the data, all ChronoCupcake's posts reallocated to a new user that can then be permabanned. Databases aren't that hard to work with, so long as you're careful

Charax wrote:
UPDATE forum_posts
SET author=Some_new_user_ID
WHERE author=ChronoCupcake
DELETE FROM users WHERE username=ChronoCupcake

user deleted, database amended, no gaps in the data, all ChronoCupcake's posts reallocated to a new user that can then be permabanned. Databases aren't that hard to work with, so long as you're careful

Which is essentially the same result as us just changing the user name, which we will gladly do.

The only problem with your script Charax I believe is the fact that it would error out on the fact that you no longer have a user named ChronoCupcake.

But yes, essentially that would be the process.

But you'd still have people quoting him and his name would still come up.

I think the OP just needs to be less paranoid

same result as us just changing the user name, which we will gladly do.

I asked for this and was told no, it's not doable. I would like the 420 dropped from my name as i'm not a big pothead anymore and I think it reflects negatively on me. I can live with it not being changed, but it would be nice.

I got re-named, but only because i had symbols in my name which;

a: Pissed people off.
b: Couldnt be copy and pasted.
c: Usually resulted in me not being able to sign in.
d: In general just didnt work in different browsers and made it impossible to read.


But yea, those were my reasons lol.

 Deathshead420 wrote:

same result as us just changing the user name, which we will gladly do.

I asked for this and was told no, it's not doable. I would like the 420 dropped from my name as i'm not a big pothead anymore and I think it reflects negatively on me. I can live with it not being changed, but it would be nice.

This will become a pretty big problem for a lot of people in the future. I imagine it already is for some.

 pretre wrote:

This will become a pretty big problem for a lot of people in the future. I imagine it already is for some.

Indeed. The internet never forgets. The real trick is to have enough monikers (unlinked to your real name) that you can abandon one if you need to, or alternatively, have a common enough name that you can count on claiming you're not that Joe Smith.

I Google for my name and nothing comes up for me within the top three pages, GIS or text.

The really funny part (other than the fact that someone named Chronocupcake is worried about being taken seriously)?

Dakka isn't until the ninth search item on google for his username. The thread that pops up? This one.

 pretre wrote:
The really funny part (other than the fact that someone named Chronocupcake is worried about being taken seriously)?

Dakka isn't until the ninth search item on google for his username. The thread that pops up? This one.

Now that's irony.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

 deathholydeath wrote:

 pretre wrote:
The really funny part (other than the fact that someone named Chronocupcake is worried about being taken seriously)?

Dakka isn't until the ninth search item on google for his username. The thread that pops up? This one.

Now that's irony.

Additionally, even if we change the user name there are still posts like yours where Chronocupcake is written out. Unless somebody goes through every post on the forum and changes what it actually typed by hand it would still show up for a google search that includes Chronocupcake.