Adieu. Aufwiedersehen. Gesundheit. Farewell.

[Merlin]

I wonder what the legal ramifications are though. If someone wants to leave a forum and deletes all their online presence, is it ethical or legal for a forum admin to restore everything?

[...]

I dont think restoring it without her permission is ethical and can bring a good lawsuit.

Was she right? No she was not, but she has the right to delete her presence if she wanted, admins are infriniging on her rights to restore posts against her wishes.

I think someone should contact her and find put if its okay.

And the way Jennifer acted, I wont put it past her to bring a lawsuit....

I'm just a volunteer and 9-year forum member. I'm not privy to all the legal details so I'm just expressing my personal opinion here. That said, I am sure that it is within the forum administrators' rights to restore content that was removed without approval.

As mentioned earlier, as part of signing up for the account you relinquish your rights to the content to the forum for community preservation purposes. There isn't anything special about that since most every web forum works that way. Normally this wouldn't be an issue since forum members cannot modify or delete their posts after 24 hours, but Jennifer was given special rights to edit her old posts in order to support the community. That did not include the right to go back to remove all her content. It would be the same if I were to just start deleting people's posts because I felt like it. I have the power but not the permission.

I think it would be different if there was the option for people to delete their own posts as part of deleting their online presence, but this forum doesn't have that option. If laws were passed to require forums to support that, then it would also be a different story since that would mean the forum would need to add a button that took care of that function for all users. Without that being the case, restoring the old content is not an ethical/legal violation in my opinion. It is more of a content management problem since it is the responsibility of the forum to maintain the content on the forum.

That is the reason that we're hesitant to remove posts or delete threads when people ask for it. We're trying to maintain an archive of the data for current and future forum visitors.