How do you respond if someone demands their posts be deleted? If they threaten legal action if you don’t?
I have something in my forums rules and signup T&C to the effect of "We don't delete accounts, posts, threads, etc. Copyright to forum posts and other information become the property of the forum." Haven't had any issues thus far as we just refer anyone wondering to that. I haven't had anyone threaten legal actions but normally people who say they are going to don't follow through anyways.
If a member wanted something deleted because it contained personal information or other special cases like that- that is a different story.
There isn't any legal action that they can take if it isn't anything that would identify them to everyone in a public manner. They can threaten with legal action, however it would fail through if they even get legal advice since they would loose pretty much 100% of the time.
I have had 1 member requesting their account be deleted and all posts removed and I simply told them they are welcome to sign out but they and their posts will not be deleted due to registering for a forum - they agree to that in general anyways.
Usually these members don't care though, they are just upset about something going on.
I've asked all of my content be deleted before on a forum, and I'd say it's a nice gesture from the staff to comply, but it's in no way expected.
Like @KnownSyntax said, even if someone was to layer up and contact you, there'd really be nothing to fear - as long as the information is not of personal nature, but that you said you'd handle in a correct manner anyway.
We don't really delete posts unless a member requests it. Personal information can easily be edited out by the staff or the user themselves; if they still want the post deleted after that though, we can comply.
Only times we delete stuff outside of it being requested is if a spam bot comes around and makes some posts on the forums. We'll delete those and ban the account associated with them.
I only delete posts if they are pretty bad, other than that, they stay. My members can delete their own posts, so it's no problem there.
I can't say I have had anything threaten legal action against me, but then again, people sue other people for the stupidest of things now a days so I wouldn't be surprised to hear about it.
