Delete all posts from a user

I have to do this periodically for Spammers.

From rthe control panel I first Ban [so that the same email address cannot be used again] before proceeding to Delete the user.

Now the same workflow does not purge their content, which in my mind it should absolutely because why else ‘Delete’ a user? The Content stay bastardized, showing ‘Anonymous’ as the username.

Then I go through individual content to delete them.

While this technically would be possible to delete a users content, this is highly unusual. I personally do not know a single community which handles requests for deletion in this way. 

The only scenario where a CM removes all posts from a user is when a user is spamming, like Anirban mentioned.

I would do my best to avert this kind of policy, as it would have a huge negative impact on readability of threads. While removing replies would damage the context of a thread, deleting entire topics (when the requestor started topics as well) will also negatively affect other users’ activity and experience.

From our perspective, again which is being shared by most (if not all) of our Community Managers, deleting private information of a user is limited to the user profile information as well as private messages, but not public posts.

We all agree on the effect missed ‘legit’ replies would have on readability of threads Julian… but curious about a non-spammer User Deletion scenario in the first place? :) 

I am afraid that Cathleens colleagues might underestimate the negative effect of deleting topics/replies in this case, hence I want to emphasize that this is very unusual.

We do not offer a native “delete all posts” feature for regular users, as this is detrimental to the interest of the community - also so far we have not seen much demand in this specific area.

Please be aware that this is not the ideal flow to prevent spam & remove spammers. Banning a user before deletion will have no effect at all, as per the deletion any record of this email address must be wiped from our database.

In order to handle this properly, you will have to mark a post of a spammer as spam - this will not just automatically ban the user (actually preventing a new registration), but also teach our spam protection what is spam and what is not. If you manually remove this content, our spam protection will not learn from it.

Now if you really want to remove all posts by a user who is not a spammer, one of the options would be to use our API to find and delete all posts from a user this way. @bas could help with more details on how to approach this, should there be demand.

Indeed, agreed with Julian that removing posts from non-spammers is most likely ill-advised.

For spammers there is an available workflow which should be used.

If absolutely needed, feel free to reach out to me and we maybe can figure out a solution using APIs and other automations.

Thanks for sharing the official Spam-busting playbook guys! 👮🏾