Account deletion

Site discussion
1

Hi,
I haven’t been here for ages but still sometimes get emails.
Since I’m in the process of switching email providers and for data security reasons, I’d like to close all my musicbrainz related accounts.

I found this Log in - MusicBrainz but am not sure if this is the best way forward since I seem to be logged in to this forum via musicbrainz and Discourse usually has a pretty neat anonymization feature (changes username to random string, closes account and deletes login data - if I ever posted any personal info publicly that’s on me). So I’d like to have my metabrainz account anonymized and will then delete my musicbrainz account.

Also I get emails for autoeditor elections and for a few jira issues. Are those different accounts?

I’m still a big fan of musicbrainz, but I don’t believe I’ll ever have the time to be active here again and if I did, I’d have to learn everything from scratch again anyway and shouldn’t have autoelector powers. :slight_smile:

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Please reconsider. If you delete your MB account your thousands of ratings and tags will be gone too.

Jira is a separate account but depending on how you signed up it may be coupled to your MB or GitHub account (via OAuth)

For autoeditor elections reo extracts the email addresses from the MB users table and uses the bulkmail script to send the mails.

If you are worried about auto-editor privileges you can have them revoked. (Which will also be done for inactive accounts if mails are bouncing)

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Ach, sorry to hear you’re leaving MB… :slight_smile:

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Good to see you appear. If only briefly. If you hit Delete then you become Deleted_User_237449 and all your valuable input is credited to something anonymous…

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Oh, okay thats not what I want.
Is there a way to anonymize my MB account?
I mean that would basically just mean renaming the account name, changing the email address to a throwaway email and changing the PW to a random string that nobody knows - if there is no real anonymization function like Discourse has.

I just checked and yeah its a separate account in my case, but I can’t find an account deletion feature.

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I don’t mind. Its not like I did it for the fame or anything. :blush:

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Maybe some sweet talking to an admin can hack the SQL database and change your name. I understand that one. Not as if I am the real Ivan Dobsky.

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Of course you can have your name changed. I vaguely remember that it was also possible to just remove the email address.
If you are extra paranoid, maybe they will also rewrite edit notes to have your name changed everywhere.

(Although, theoretically it would still be possible to link past usernames to a person if someone keeps historical dumps, scrapes the website or creates snapshots like the Internet Archive, RSS feed reader archives, edit note notification emails, mentions your name in other places while linking to MB, etc.)

Surely someone from MetaBrainz can help with that too.

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You can get in touch with us at support and ask for whatever, I’ll try to help :slight_smile: The most direct way to delete the account is deleting the account, but yes, that’ll remove stuff like tags and ratings. We could migrate it to a new email address, rename it as you wish, and you could remove email sending if you want from your preferences; the rename should be automatically applied to Discourse too.

Autoeditor privs can indeed be taken off - I just did it for someone else on request today who hadn’t been active in a long time.

The Jira account is separate, but I see I can change username, full name and email apparently so I should be able to anonymize it to some degree (I think deleting it cannot be done without deleting any tickets and comments you entered).

Just let us know what you’d prefer :slight_smile:

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