I've been receiving a number of e-mails from diarists who've signed up but decide they don't want to continue and would like their account to be deleted. Whilst it's sad, it's inevitable that the site won't be for everyone and it's of course their right to have the account deleted. It's kind of also the law - at least in the UK and Europe.

At the moment there's no way for users to delete their own accounts and I have to manually delete people from the database.

This is fraught with danger because working on a live database with powerful database tools is a really really bad idea.

So, I have updated the development system to ensure that all the database constraints are now properly in place, such that deleting an account will automatically delete all of the data associated with that account. Diaries, entries, comments, notification requests. Everything. If the account goes, there's nothing to tie back to, so it all must go.

It's taken a lot of work because the system has only just got used to the idea of people having multiple user names - and a LOT of the code really wasn't set up for that. So I had to fix all those random areas of code up first.

I think I've now completed that - and my end to end automated tests now pass again (which they weren't). But it's a pretty big code change and so there may be foibles ahead.

I was going to upload the changes tonight but to be honest, I'm a bit knackered and I'm now going to wait until Tuesday to do it. I'm at work on Sunday and Monday and although I'd have time to do it before work, it would need to be done only if I can be certain it won't need hand-holding to stop it falling over.

And I can never be certain of that!

So, Tuesday it is. There will almost certainly be some downtime. I aim to start work on it at around 10am UTC. Give or take 😀

I will post an update when it's done! Then I can stop responding to people wanting to delete their account and do something more fun instead!