How to get out?

While you're at it, how about pruning the N thousand accounts who have signed up, logged in once or twice, and never posted anything? Being observers, I doubt they have much effect on the trust metric...

It might make things faster, even...

But casantos is not Observer. So he couldn't be easily removed. Also he have posted an article.

I thinks the only thing could be done is just to "disable" login (simply change password) and leaving some note to diary - "The last note".

I'm afraid this will intersect with censorship. In other words - how will you choose person to be authorized to remove anything. Even The person is not authorized to do so for some reasons (it could be just hack of login, it could be something to do with consistency of base (articles/diaries/crosslinks), it is just a question of information saving/archiving).

Pfff, my stinky portal only prints the titles of the stories. I was expecting an article on how to get down the pub. Not that I would need it anyway :P

Advogato doesn't really have a way to delete accounts. It's not trivial, because it would also involve fixing up internal references to things such as authorship of articles.

My personal advice is to simply ignore your account from now on. That seems to work well for most people. However, if that's really not acceptable, then please feel free to work out a good design for account deletion in mod_virgule, and get the patches integrated.

I'm just thinking... why would you want to remove yourself from a trust system?

Perhaps you might "lose trust" in the system (as opposed to the entities within the system), and might want to distance yourself from it (since you are possibly accountable to decisions you make). But, in this case, you can simply remove all certifications you make to other people.

Perhaps you want to hide the fact that you were part of the system. (Some people are crazy about their privacy!) Obviously, you should be able to retract (public) statements that you make... but should you be able to destroy the fact those statements existed? Is a history of "what was said" important?

Casantos: obviously, you have a reason... do you mind sharing it? Thanks!

I've got working code for account deletion (and project deletion) that handles most of the reference clean-up needed. I was just completing it when the mod_virgule merge project started. It's on my list of patches that will be submitted eventually but there are still a few other things ahead of it in the queue. I built it because I needed to removed old, unused accounts from robots.net with a cron job but it wouldn't be to hard to add an interface so a user could delete their own account.

i doubt it. i like the idea that accounts can't be deleted once created but newcomers can request to inherit old accounts if they so wish. This kind of continuation mode is what lacks in the digital world. It is far too easy to erase than to keep. I believe automation is always a kind of amputation. At the excuses of short term hardware constraints, automation sacrifices the natural selection over long time spans. It sacrifices the evolution process made by human consciousness.

Time is something I have more and more in my face and less and less in my hands. There is no point on participating of a trust system if you don't have time to interact with the community. And for my own physical and mental health I need to spend my few spare time interacting more with my family and friends and less with hacking.

Once upon a time (oh no, that word again!) I had the illusion that carefully managing my schedule I would get some free hours a week for hacking and things like Advogato. I failed. No, I didn't! I just have a real life and a real job to care about. Look at my diary postings and you will se that I had to abandon a project (neXtaw) because I was not even doing a bad job, I was doing no job.

Contrarily, i stayed on advogato for the sake of discovering funs for my family . You don't have to leave advogato. But you have to remember bringing in your family interest into this community. We all have a family to care for. That is the whole point.