Account deletion

If a person would like their OpenHatch account deleted, this is the process we follow for those requests. There are two OpenHatch roles here; sometimes a person might take on both roles, but they can be distinct people. One role is technical -- executing commands that require privilege -- and the other one is a general helper.

First, the requester should email the general OpenHatch contact address (hello@openhatch.org).

• OpenHatch general helper: Reply to the inbound email, and thank the person for having an account, and see if there is an issue we can fix -- for example, if the reason they want to delete their account is that they can't log in, offer to reset their password. If they have made it clear already they simply want the account deleted, the general helper should reply to their message with the username of the account we would delete, and a link to the OpenHatch profile for that account.

• After the person replies with some part of the mail quoted, the OpenHatch general helper now has a good reason to believe the inbound email was not forged, and that the conversation is legitimately with the person who owns that email address. At that point, you should contact an OpenHatch technical helper.

• OpenHatch technical helper will then execute whatever commands are required to get the user's account deleted or modified as necessary. Steps for the tech helper:
  • From your own machine, log into the main OpenHatch VM with: ssh deploy@linode.openhatch.org
  • From the login shell, start a Django management Python shell:
    • cd milestone-a
    • python manage.py shell_plus
  • Now, delete the user. Enter this to find + print the user's data, and give it a visual sanity-check:
    • u = Users.objects.filter(email='person@example.com')
    • print u
  • If it looks good, do:
    • u.delete()

(Relevant issue with open questions about deleting associated wiki user and Vanilla forum user.)