Hacker News Reader

> If I ran a forum for a number of years, and a person decided to close their account, that'd be fine. But if they then said that I need to remove _all of their posts_, that's really shitty.

> It would destroy the usefulness of a forum.

Couldn't you just anonymize their posts, for instance by updating their username to something like "Deleted User"? Wouldn't you be fine as long as there wasn't anything left to link them to their real identity?

View on HN

What if some used quoted another user without the quote function? Or took a snippet from a user as forum signature?

Those are easily handled but still if you are a hobbist it’s just too much hassle.

I asked something similar in the Instapaper story:

A general question for the GDPR experts: If user A does a request of their data and user B added a page their Instapaper account that had user A listed, does that page have to be included in the response to user A?

I didn't get an answer there. It is basically the same scenario of one user referencing another.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com