Are the posts created by that forum member deleted if they also delete their own account? Or, are they not able to login to the forum anymore? Just wondering as it could be devastating to a forum if a long time member with thousands of posts deleted his account and all those posts suddenly disappeared.
Depends on the forum software. Sometimes it deletes the posts, sometimes it just leaves the poster as some guest with the same name as the deleted member.
I am quite sure that MyBB wont delete the post if I delete the user from the ACP. Few months back I have some spammer on my forums and I delete them instead of pruning of their posts. I had a hard time deleting all the guest posts after that; the posts will stay there as guest.
Instead I instruct the member to add a bogus email address and I will change their username to something else. That way, they can come back if they want to in the future without needing to create another account.
I think it depends on the forum algorithm. Some may have delete option of all the posts once the account is deleted while some may have the posts there itself by the name of guest contribute.
Only the administrators and moderators are allowed to delete accounts, but we will never honor such requests; once registered, your account stays with us forever.
On the forum software I use, on the administrative side, the administrator can choose if they want to delete the users and leave the posts, or delete both the user and the posts in one click. At last check, when the user deletes himself, the posts stay.
ZetaBoards doesn't allow users to delete their own accounts, so I don't have to worry about someone deleting themselves. However, even then, deleting a member doesn't remove their posts on ZetaBoards nor InvisionFree.
Really depends on how you build it. You can make it hard for people to withdraw content, plus you can give them an option to withdraw their name from their content and thus 'extract' themselves from it. These are more custom built functions I believe, but it can be done.