For reference, this was the thread @pitrou posted on Discourse Meta, which had a number of useful responses:
The account merge feature looks like a useful and mostly non-destructive way to resolve this problem, but I’m not seeing an option for it, perhaps because I’m only a mod and not an admin.
In any case, I’ve gone ahead and removed the relevant bits of personal information (name, age, country, etc) from the user’s posts, adding a note stating this was done by me per the user’s request, and removing all previous revisions from the revision history. I also flagged the rest of the mod team to take a look at this.
We actually had a fairly extensive discussion about this last time a user requested account deletion, who in that case also included a signature in their posts:
Per that discussion, last time this came up, the conclusion was that forum posts are not generally required to be deleted by the GDPR, and personal information that the user voluntarily chooses to include in their own posts (as opposed to that collected “by the system”, like profiles), appears to be somewhat of a gray area. However, if a user requested such be removed, then we of course would not object and be happy to scrub it for them, and particularly in this case given the amount of personal detail provided it seemed quite prudent.
Additionally, I would be in favor of a policy of no post signatures (which are generally very rare here anyway, though ironically both the users who recently requested account deletion had them), like Discourse Meta has, as they are just redundant clutter that takes up space and presents most of the problem in this regard.
As for
Yup, I am indeed aware of that option, thanks, though only posts younger than 60 days (of which those posts were not) can be deleted by default without admins (of which I am not) manually overriding the setting and then performing the action. And that’s a very drastic, destructive option to delete a relatively small fraction of personal data that should only be taken as a last resort. There was a general community consensus against allowing deleting posts, particularly OPs and at large scale, aside from exceptional circumstances, per e.g. this thread:
As well as on other threads, where retaining messages as part of a reasonably permanent archive outside of exceptional situations just like the legacy mailing lists Discourse has replaced was part of the agreed social contract of switching to it.