Forum:Resetting a user account

I'll probably send this as a Special:Contact report, but maybe this question has been asked before of Wikia by one of our Community Central Forum visitors...

On WoWWiki, we've been getting alot of user account creations that are for the sole purpose of putting a spam link on a user page. This seems like a waste of a user account, so I was wondering if I should ask Wikia to reset these account names as if they had never been created.

I know Wikia has tools to change user names, but has anyone ever asked to have a user account reset to reclaim a user name? -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 5 Apr 2011 8:53 AM Pacific


 * I don't think that's possibe. Staff can disable user accounts, but deleting user accounts means that edits made by those accounts would be orphaned, or even worse, if a user creates an account with the same name the old edits would be assigned to the new user. Even if edits were deleted, they can be restored. Maybe if it's a separate user database like uncyc it may be feasible. --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) -WikiDex 17:27, April 5, 2011 (UTC)


 * Hmmm... I thought it might be something like that. Most of these users only have 1 edit, so the edit issue isn't that big a deal, but it sounds like it still might be more work than Wikia would want to do, unless they made a tool to do it already. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 5 Apr 2011 10:20 AM Pacific


 * It is technically possible to delete an account, but Wikia doesn't do it. It's worth noting that theoretically, you could solve the edit problem could be solved by moving the edits associated with the account being deleted to a dummy account, such as User:DeletedUser. But Wikia might need to write a script for that.