Dang said exactly that. What’s your email, I’ll forward it.

Changing my username to something random doesn’t help, because it’s trivial to find a comment or two that make it clear that random user ID is me, and then you can see all my comments.

There are two much better approaches.

1. Make every single comment of mine a new random user if so they’re all separate.

2. Make the user id of everyone who has ever asked for deletion ”deleted-user” so my comments are lost in the sea.

Either of those approaches would make it impossible to find all my old comments and know they all belong to the real me in the real world.

Please help. Death threats are not fun, especially when you have a 2 year old daughter. There is a 100+ page forum thread of people betting on when I (real name, real person) am going to die. Just saying that somewhat Doxxes me.

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tomhow an hour ago | parent [-]

My email is the same as Dan's. hn@ycombinator.com. Yes you can forward it and I'll read it straight away.

We can't necessarily do the exact things you've asked, because it makes all the discussion threads you participated in incoherent. We can take reasonable steps to disassociate personally-identifying comments from others.

> Please help. Death threats are not fun, especially when you have a 2 year old daughter. There is a 100+ page forum thread of people betting on when I (real name, real person) am going to die. Just saying that somewhat Doxxes me.

This sounds terrible, and of course we don't want anything like that for you. It's just not clear (and I still haven't received an email from you so I can't look into the details of the case) how the actions you're specifying that we need to take on HN will fix this issue on some other website. I don't know any details other than the limited information you're sharing here. I can't find any emails about this matter linked to the username you're commenting from here.

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mindslight 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

It seems like you should be able to do a middle ground that preserves the commenter identity in each individual thread, while destroying the links across different threads.

For example, reserve the usernames 'deleted-xxxx' where x is a number. Then when someone wants their history obliterated, loop over every thread they have commented in. For each thread, choose a random number deleted-xxxx and assign that username to every comment of theirs in that thread.

Thus comments in the thread remain linked with one another, other deleted users in the thread remain distinct, and comments in one thread aren't linkable to a user's comments in another thread (perhaps lamentable, but required for unlinking spilled personal info in the general case)

(I chose random numbers rather than incrementing so that one can't start making inferences about users based on deletion order)

	▲	vvbull 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It should just be randomly generated when the page loads. "Oh, this user has the 'dormant' flag set? Generate a uid on page load" so all their comments have consistency for that one viewer for that single page load. Then if you click that user to see all the posts by them, you get an empty set. (Have the search queries return nothing for dormant users.)