Deleting banned accounts on your forum?

[Heatman]

How do you go about banned accounts on your forum? Do you usually delete them once they have been banned? Personally, I don't see it as being necessary to delete their accounts because at one point, they have added good contents to the site before they were banned. Also, if it's not a permanent ban, they might end up wanting to come back with a changed attitude and mindset which there's nothing wrong in letting them back in.

 

[Tracy]

By deleting a banned account, you can cause more issues. Normally you ban a user that email cannot be used again, and the IP is tracked. You delete it, you lose those two benefits.

 

[Reverie]

I don't delete banned members - one so I can keep track of usernames and IPs in case of them joining again in the future. If they are posting inappropriate things I do edit that, and may delete posts depending on the content.

 

[Arantor]

Yup, most of the time if you delete a banned member, you break the ban in the process enabling them to re-register.

 

[Cory]

What has been said above holds very true and I would prefer my members know if a user has broken our TOS of some sort instead of deleting their account, which would maybe think they wanted it deleted upon request for specific reasons, like privacy.

 

[Oblivion Knight]

The vast majority of bans I dish out are for spam accounts. I recently opted to delete these accounts, since email and IP bans are pretty arbitrary these days anyway..

 

[Ravenfreak]

Most banned accounts I have on my communities are spam accounts. I usually will delete these accounts.