All my messages and notifications are gone

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Anyone else having this problem? I just noticed

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And only 1 post is showing up in my activity section despite my profile saying I have 1, 800

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As in your private messages are gone too?

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Yes. Ditto apparently accidentally deleted my account because I commented in a delete my account thread even though I didn’t say anything about wanting a deletion

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Maybe this suggests it would be better if there was only one “delete my account” thread, and each person should only post there if they wish for that to happen (or if they’re part of the admin team, they can communicate with those delete-hopefuls for whatever the reason might be)?

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I commented “only mods can delete accounts” in one of the more recent threads ten days ago and Ditto accidentally deleted my account and restored it before it was fully deactivated. But all my messages and notifications in the last 2.5 years are gone as a result

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Yeah, so I’m saying they should have better controls against accidents like these.

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Another recent case similar to this one: How we lost 54k GitHub stars – HTTPie blog

Lesson #1: UI/UX design

Show, don’t tell. Design confirmation dialogs in a don’t-make-me-think fashion. When the user is about to destroy something, don’t describe that as a potential scenario in abstract words that the user needs to convert to mental images and put values on. Especially when cascade-deleting as a side effect of the primary action

Lesson #2: Database design

Use soft-deletes. People are human and they make mistakes. For hard-deletes, delay the process.

But regardless, is there no way to add a user-specific button which handles data deletion on its own? This site supports 2FA and logging in via email of all things, so the absence of an account deletion button seems strange.

Edit: (Corrected by @Jingle), there is indeed a button. If that is the case, I think the approach at this point is to just guide users to use that button, rather than making a mod/admin do it

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There is a button to delete your account, I’m not sure if people don’t know where it is at or it doesn’t work

IF you click on your icon on the top right, click on the preference icon (the icon that looks like a person), select preference, then scroll down to where it says “delete my account”

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Yeah it’s pretty hard to find the button to delete your own account but it’s under preferences

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I mean- it doesn’t seem ‘hard’ to find. But I feel a lot of people (myself included) were under the impression that contacting a mod was the only way to delete your account (given the frequency)

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I thought so too until I happen to see it one day going through the options.

I didn’t know if they was a later add on or its always been there and people just haven’t seen it.

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Great so now the thing that made me lose 2.5 years worth of messages and notifications accidentally wasn’t even necessary

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So Ditto recovered my messages with him on my end by inviting me back to the thread but I don’t necessarily know how that works, but if you figure it out and have a convo with me, just do that

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Yes :slightly_smiling_face: . Just go to the very first message and it gives you the option to “add or remove” user.

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Maybe that’s why I didn’t hear back from ya like a month ago??

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No everything was fine then, I guess I just couldn’t think of a response