Blizzard has blocked the possibility to remove account
twitter.com
twitter.com
We've recently used this exact process (to remove an authenticator), and it was glitchy/problematic even before today, with a ton of people trying to use it at once (and I assume Blizzard staff manually verifying IDs?) I suspect Blizzard's verification system has imploded.
Kind of a similar thing happened when "WoW Classic" launched. The first 24-48 hours the whole ID recovery workflow was doing similar things/broken.
It is still on them to fix it, and people are still entitled to complain, this post is more a remark on intent (purposely down Vs. just having a bad recovery system). Although "It has sucked for a while" isn't a great defense anyway.
The fact that they fail at basic account management/authentication doesn't say good things for them. I wouldn't be surprised if they drag their feet a little getting it fixed, but I doubt it's going to matter.
So I'd guess technical issues as well.
The main thing that comes to mind is that there might be some kind of global deletion throttle to help catch abuse and it's been heavily tripped due to the recent activity. It kinda lines up with the error message.
And it's not like they'd be the size they are and not have metrics on people trying to delete.
edit: Just to be clear. Like the link said, there were other authentication methods, like SMS. Blizzard disabled the other ones on purpose.
If you got hacked and didn't want this to happen, would you still feel the same way?
2. An active decision being taken. The response to this from customers motivated by the recent Hong Kong dustup is going to be sheer outrage. Regardless of reality, it's certainly being interpreted as #2. Not a good look for Blizzard.
(* I'm not sure if they have any other games with automatic recurring payments, but if so I assume it works the same way.)
Make it hard, and you may keep a small fraction of these customers, but make all of them hate you, make them hesitant to re-subscribe, and make a significant fraction just go through alternative means (e.g. chargeback, cancelling cards, letting a prepaid credit card run dry) that end up costing more than that.
Most notably, nothing within the GDPR requires removal of an account, only (in some cases) removal of Personal Data.
This still assumes you care about being punished by the EU.
A company with no financial contact with the EU doesn't have to care about that, any more than a company with no financial contact with Saudi Arabia has to worry about offending the House of Saud.
Similar to how Twitter sent out marketing to contact devices registered for account recovery.
and how do they verify that the email requesting an account be deleted, is coming from the actual owner of that account?
Anywhere else, having to contact a moderator to ask permission to have one's account deleted would be considered a user hostile dark pattern, nefarious motives assumed by default. But when Hacker News does it, well obviously it's just another sign of the elegance behind its design.
A simple forum also has reply notifications, that HN has not. It is difficult to accept that HN is different from other forum software, with different priorities?
I don't know what being writing in Lisp implies that HN have to have some specific feature that you think it needs.
> Anywhere else, having to contact a moderator to ask permission to have one's account deleted would be considered a user hostile dark pattern, nefarious motives assumed by default. But when Hacker News does it, well obviously it's just another sign of the elegance behind its design.
It would be considered a dark pattern if the moderators were against deleting accounts, giving excuses or making the process unnecessary difficult. Since it seems that the moderators delete your account without bothering you, I don't think this is a dark pattern at all.
I don't object to the fact that this forum lacks particular features, I can accept that, although I would disagree that they would add unnecessary complexity or would somehow damage the "signal to noise" ratio of the community. I object to the tendency of people here to assume that any features this forum lacks are a priori without value because it lacks them.
If they don't want to add these particular features, fine, but people need to stop cargo culting the simplicity of this forum. Some of the features here are intentionally, actively user hostile and we should admit that Hacker News gets a pass for no other reason than it's Hacker News.
>I don't know what being writing in Lisp implies that HN have to have some specific feature that you think it needs.
I was snarking on the way people sometimes describe how elegant and powerful Lisp is, almost as if it were magic. Sometimes I forget this place is where humor goes to die. Mea culpa.
I mean, if the number of users deleting account is low why bother implementing a feature in first place? If the mods were overwhelmed with requests and would start giving excuses to delete your account thanks to this, now I think the lack of account deletion in HN would be user hostile.
pg may have stated that at some point but I am not sure.
The point that started this all off is that HN has different priorities and those priorities disallow you from deleting accounts.
There's nothing to defend here, deleting your account is a 100% reasonable request.
Like I said below, it is really reasonable to not have a feature if the number of users asking to delete their accounts is manageable by mods. If it wasn’t, and thanks to this the mods would avoid deleting accounts, giving lame excuses or taking a long time, now I think the lack of this feature is user hostile.
HN isn't harvesting your email addresses and associated old comments for money or trying to pump up some user account growth number. Plus technically they could still easily keep your email/comments if you deleted your account in some archive.
I'm not sure what other value they could possibly draw from this where it could be some sort of tactic.
Let's just be happy YC is hosting this stuff for free and doing an excellent job.
Hats off to them.