Is there an easy way to delete closed accounts "DELETED MESSAGE" posts?

[BeePOD]

When a user especially a long time user closes their account is makes all of their posts say "DELETED BY USER" rather than having hundreds of those cluttering up my forum is their any EASY way rather than spending HOURS going through and deleting each one?

All those posts should be automatically deleted when a user closes their account, its totally not cool to leave trash behind and then to get rid of it I have to spend hours going to each post and delete it!

That is VERY user UN friendly... Not to mention leaving all those "DELETED BY USER" posts causes other users to send many, many, many messages, "What happened to so and so?" which also becomes annoying... There is NO good reasons to leave those "DELETED BY USER" posts in place when a user closes their account! ALL of their posts and replies should be automatically deleted when the account is closed, now I have to go spend HOURS going through and deleting every post... I think I would rather just close the entire forum than have to do that and leaving them is not an option it looks horrible to have those posts all throughout the entire forum...

There is more than 600 posts by this user and now I have 600 + "DELETED BY USER" posts littering up my forum... VERY BAD!

[GregChapman]

BeePOD wrote

When a user especially a long time user closes their account is makes all of their posts say "DELETED BY USER" rather than having hundreds of those cluttering up my forum is their any EASY way rather than spending HOURS going through and deleting each one?

All those posts should be automatically deleted when a user closes their account, its totally not cool to leave trash behind and then to get rid of it I have to spend hours going to each post and delete it!

Normally, people don't "close", i.e. delete, their account, they just lose interest and stop posting. If someone deletes their account it usually means you have a disgruntled member who has "had enough" and wants to completely disassociate themselves from the forum and the way it is run. That is always unfortunate and would make me wish I had handled things rather differently. However, to answer your question...

The reason those empty messages are there is because if you delete any message the system will also remove all the replies to the deleted message - the system is designed on the basis that a reply is necessarily meaningless without an original post. However, as this approach would devastate many a forum, the Nabble team took the view that it is better to leave in a blank message so that a disgruntled member couldn't also take out vast numbers of other people's posts as he left.

If you manually delete these "empty" messages, then you will similarly devastate your forum, particularly if the old member was an especially active member. In short, I would counsel against making your planned deletions.

I hope I am not teaching you to suck eggs in what follows, but from this topic and your earlier posts I'm guessing that you have upset an active poster. They have either become fed up with some reaction or decision of yours affecting them or some other member who they felt was in the right. If something like this is the case, then perhaps the best you can do is to pin a topic for a few weeks in a prominent place on your forum giving your explanation of the situation (be brief, fair and factual, even accepting some level of blame and offering an apology in order to pacify those who might think your behaviour had been unreasonable) and hope that your users accept your point of view. In an active forum all those empty messages will soon drop out of sight. Then you can unpin your explanation and apology and let the issue be forgotten as an unfortunate incident in the past.