PHP & MySQL - How should I allow my members to delete their membership from my site?

What is the best way to allow a member to delete their account if they wish to not be a member of our community? Should I simply have them click a delete button on the site? What other measures s开发者_JAVA百科hould I use?

There are a fair few good answers already, but I will add my bit here to be sure that the couple of points I want to raise are covered off (or opened to discussion).

User Actions Required to Terminate Account

As has been pointed out by other respondents, you want to make the process of terminating an account as easy, and yet as clear/safe as possible. Having a button in the Account/Profile Settings section of your site is the best place to have this function (as it tends to be there for almost all sites). And, when the user elects to terminate an account, be sure to have a confirmation message before completing that action (nothing worse than "accidentally" killing an account).

If you are interested in user retention, having an optional quick exit survey can give you a good insight into the reason why some users may be terminating their accounts, so incorporating this into the confirmation action may be useful.

Site Actions after Termination

A practice I have seen used in a few instances (and I quite like), is for an email to be generated to the User's email account when they terminate a user account.

It allows you to try and "save" the user, if retention is an issue, again, you can offer them a way of giving feedback regarding the site, and generally let them know that their contribution will be missed.

If you use the suggestion of flagging an account as "Inactive" (but retaining their data), you can advise them, in that email, the steps they can go through should they decide to return and want their old account back.

Handling of User Data after Termination

There are a few solutions here, dependent on the kind of site you are running, how much of the content is user-generated, the terms of your user agreement, etc.

General Recommendation

The simplest, easiest, and most mistake-friendly way to handle a user termination is to have a field in the user table which allows you to simply mark an account as Active/Inactive, and, when the user terminates their account, switch that to Inactive.

This allows you to recover the account, should they change their mind, run statistics on your retention rates, etc.

Sites with alot of User-Generated Content

Simply deleting a user's account when they leave can cause you problems - links from comments/articles/other content which would normally be associated with a user will break. In these instances, and so long as the User Agreement allows for it, I would recommend that you flag their account as "Terminated"/"Inactive", so that some aspects of the account can be switched off, but still retain the details required to make the rest of the site operate OK.

Sites with User-Generated, but Private, Content

In this instance, if you are planning to delete the user's details from your databases/files, you will also have to have code which will remove anything associated with that account from wherever it may be - for instance, deleting any pictures that user uploaded, any comments, etc. they entered, etc. Anything which JOINs with the user table will need to be systematically erased.

Generally, sites make you jump through hurdles to close an account. It is frustrating for the end user.

What I would have, is a Close Account button somewhere, which takes you to a page that asks you to (optionally) leave a comment why you are closing the account. This will be helpful for you, so you know why people are feeling it necessary to close their account.

Then send them an email with a unique string, that they must click to close their account.

This prevents people who may have left their session logged in from having their account closed :).

For the technical side of things, you may want to simply DELETE in MySQL from all tables their relevant data, and clean up any file based data (such as uploaded images, user specific caches etc).

First of all, you should know if you want to keep their data (for some time at least) for if they want to recover the information.

If the anser is no (much simpler). The just add a php script that when a button is pressed (in their profile) deletes the mysql (or what ever) database...

EDIT:

Measures: They should go their accounts, go to configure settings (or similar) and then delete account, they should definitely have ONE warning page

This question is very broad and is more of a general business question (potentially) rather than programming specific question. Your options are limited only by your brain power. Really, you don't have to let people leave your community at all (probably a bad idea). What services does the user receive from being a member of your community? When they leave do these all cease? How does the user's information affect you? Could you still use it even after they have left?

These are questions that only you (and your manager) can answer. I agree that it is generally pretty frustrating to cancel some accounts. Many sites don't even give you the ability to cancel at all, but they may have a mailing exclusions list or some such.

My suggestion would be to have a flag for users in the DB. When a user quits, set the flag. Once you know that user is flagged, you can manipulate any data with respect to them in any way you see fit. Want to run a report on only active users? No problem! All inactive users are flagged. You keep their data for however long and use it as you wish, and if it was a mistake and they never wanted to leave, you take 5 seconds out of your busy day to unflag them.