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copied!<p>There are a fair few good answers already, but I will add my bit here to be sure that the couple of points I want to raise are covered off (or opened to discussion).</p> <h2>User Actions Required to Terminate Account</h2> <p>As has been pointed out by other respondents, you want to make the process of terminating an account as easy, and yet as clear/safe as possible. Having a button in the Account/Profile Settings section of your site is the best place to have this function (as it tends to be there for almost all sites). And, when the user elects to terminate an account, be sure to have a confirmation message before completing that action (nothing worse than "accidentally" killing an account).</p> <p>If you are interested in user retention, having an <em>optional</em> quick exit survey can give you a good insight into the reason why some users may be terminating their accounts, so incorporating this into the confirmation action may be useful.</p> <h2>Site Actions after Termination</h2> <p>A practice I have seen used in a few instances (and I quite like), is for an email to be generated to the User's email account when they terminate a user account.</p> <p>It allows you to try and "save" the user, if retention is an issue, again, you can offer them a way of giving feedback regarding the site, and generally let them know that their contribution will be missed.</p> <p>If you use the suggestion of flagging an account as "Inactive" (but retaining their data), you can advise them, in that email, the steps they can go through should they decide to return and want their old account back.</p> <h2>Handling of User Data after Termination</h2> <p>There are a few solutions here, dependent on the kind of site you are running, how much of the content is user-generated, the terms of your user agreement, etc.</p> <h3>General Recommendation</h3> <p>The simplest, easiest, and most mistake-friendly way to handle a user termination is to have a field in the user table which allows you to simply mark an account as Active/Inactive, and, when the user terminates their account, switch that to Inactive.</p> <p>This allows you to recover the account, should they change their mind, run statistics on your retention rates, etc.</p> <h3>Sites with alot of User-Generated Content</h3> <p>Simply deleting a user's account when they leave can cause you problems - links from comments/articles/other content which would normally be associated with a user will break. In these instances, and so long as the User Agreement allows for it, I would recommend that you flag their account as "Terminated"/"Inactive", so that some aspects of the account can be switched off, but still retain the details required to make the rest of the site operate OK.</p> <h3>Sites with User-Generated, but Private, Content</h3> <p>In this instance, if you are planning to delete the user's details from your databases/files, you will also have to have code which will remove anything associated with that account from wherever it may be - for instance, deleting any pictures that user uploaded, any comments, etc. they entered, etc. Anything which JOINs with the user table will need to be systematically erased.</p>

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