Delete your Alelyon account

Deleting your account cannot be undone. It happens at once.

What is deleted

• Your email address, display name, username and password.
• The sign-in providers linked to the account, such as Google or GitHub.
• Every session: every device and browser signed in to the account is signed out.
• Your friends, friend requests and presence, and your conversations. A conversation is deleted for both people, as when you remove a friend.
• Any hosted access key issued to the account, and your password-reset links.
• On Pages: your public page, your posts, your likes, and your follows and blocks, both ways. A post somebody replied to or quoted stays as an empty placeholder, so their words keep their place; its text is deleted.
• Your memberships of organizations. An organization nobody else is an active member of closes with your account, and its ticker is free again. If you are the last owner of an organization that has other members, make another member an owner first; until then the account cannot be deleted here.

What is kept

A record that an account existed and was deleted, with the times of its security events, such as sign-ins and password changes. It holds no name, email address, username, password, message or IP address.

Reports you made, and reports about you or your posts, stay with the moderators, a report's own note included; so does the moderators' record of what they did. They name the deleted account's anonymous record, not you. Posts you made as an organization that stays open stay up as that organization's posts, without your name; its owners and admins can see that their author's account was deleted.

If Alelyon's moderators suspended your page, your username stays reserved after the deletion, as does the ticker of a suspended organization that closes with it: nobody can take them while you may appeal. We keep the name, when and why it was reserved, and a keyed fingerprint of your email address to check an appeal against, never the address itself, until a successful appeal releases it.

For up to a day, what anybody could already see about your address stays as it was until it runs out on its own: a sign-up somebody started with it, and the limits on sign-ups, emails and failed sign-ins. That way nobody watching the address can tell that the account was deleted. Each is deleted within 10 minutes of running out.

The account service's disk is backed up every hour and each backup is kept for 7 days, so a deleted account's data can remain in a backup for up to 7 days.

Afterwards

We send one email to the account's address to say it was deleted. It has no link.

You can create a new account with the same address at any time. It starts empty.

No password?

An account created by signing in with a provider such as Google or GitHub has no password. First set one with a reset link, which we email to the account's address. Then delete the account here with that password.

Too many attempts?

After 5 wrong passwords for an account within 15 minutes, from anybody, this page refuses to delete it, as signing in refuses, until they are 15 minutes old. The right password, typed here or to sign in, clears the count. Alelyon can still delete the account on request (below).

Cannot sign in?

An account with no email address (some ORCID sign-ins) cannot get a reset link, and an account Alelyon has disabled cannot sign in, so neither can be deleted here. Alelyon deletes them on request: the Privacy Notice says how to ask.