Why would someone on MSE become a [deleted user]?

B0bbyEwing

Was looking for someone & turns out they're now [deleted user] with 0 posts.

Does this mean they're banned, that they've requested an account deletion? Can you delete your own account?

Just curious is all.

elsien

You can’t delete your own account.
It’s where probably where people have flounced and requested that their information be removed. 

B0bbyEwing

Oh right. That's a shame, he was quite a knowledgeable person.

Thanks for the reply.

eskbanker

It also happens when posters fall foul of the admin team once too often and have posting privileges permanently removed:

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/site/forum-faqs/#act

Unless the infractions were serious enough for all traces of a user to be wiped, their posts should still be left in situ, but it's obviously harder to find them....

Neil_Jones

B0bbyEwing said:

Was looking for someone & turns out they're now [deleted user] with 0 posts.

Does this mean they're banned, that they've requested an account deletion? Can you delete your own account?

Just curious is all.

More likely to be the case they've had a moan about some company/practice/policy somewhere and didn't like any of the replies they got because the issue being whinged about was self inflicted in the first place and they didn't get any sympathy.  This seems to happen a lot if posters don't get the responses they want...  So they'll either delete the content of the post and/or request their account is removed.

People can also request account deletion for other reasons rather than the above and that's fine if its a while down from when they first first started posting.

As above you can get banned as well and do something stupid to get that but realistically its more likely to be the "Wasn't told what I wanted to hear" thing.

B0bbyEwing

Hmm I don't think it's a banning. I've seen banned profiles and IIRC they're marked as banned or something to that effect and when you search say a thread they've made - their username is still listed.

Whereas this person has been deleted.