@Evil are you talking on the main site? can you give an example? basically SE design doesnt care too much about avoiding disruptions in content due to deleted users. in fact have seen significant chat content vanish due to deleted users, some related to my own conversations etc, dont like the scenario myself either.

@Evil I think it is mostly because rewriting all comments where someone was mentioned would be pretty expensive computationally. This has probably been discussed before, let me have a look.

Related proposals to solve this issue are linked to this question.

@Discretelizard This would make sense to me. Imagine a top contributor on SO changing their name... absolute chaos! The amount of updates needed would be crazy. There may be a few _practical_(?) ways to do this. For instance, allow users to "schedule" a name change. This would allow SE to wait until low-traffic and run a job to change everything (freezing the user's account for the duration of this job to avoid conflicts / reduce overhead). Also maybe, only allow a certain number of username changes..

Restricting the amount could potentially help reduce over and abuse of the system. It could also be a long the lines of "you get 3 name changes, used at least a month apart"

Another option to reduce abuse would be to make that a privilege. After X+ rep you can do this. Maybe even more practical would be reverse privilege. You lose this ability after you comment enough / get enough rep so as to reduce overhead. Idk, just some ideas, seems easy to implement but difficult to optimize.

Also @Evil, bravo on cs.stackexchange.com/a/107332/68251.

Is there a variant of Sudoku where diagonals cannot contain repeated values? Thought about it after see... this cs.stackexchange.com/q/107394/68251

@Discretelizard Thank you. Well, I found that one of our contributors recently vanished, when I read one of posts and user was blanked. Comment led me to that, so it is somehow privacy issue. I know, that it may be intensive task, but when auto-expand @username would get translated into @user-id, 8 years back it would be no overhead at all.

There is a law, right to be forgotten, so if anyone would ask for it for real, it need to be done. Switching names is just collateral.

@ryan Thank you, but it was team effort, and in fact you did the most important step to rewrite it. Now another question you have mentioned, I do not understand list1 AND list2 AND list 3, what this operator does?

@Discretelizard ok, it probably is better workload / need ratio. It just does not give privacy by default. In the text for account deletion there is a statement "your questions and answers will remain on the site, but will be anomized and disassociated..." i.stack.imgur.com/ax9nl.png this is simply not true then

@Evil Well, it doesn't mention comments doesn't it? Furthermore, why stop at comments? Users are sometimes mentioned in answers or questions as well. Should those be anonymized as well? I'm not saying this invalidates anything, but I'm not sure that redacting others mentioning you falls under the right to be forgotten. Of course, partially automated mentions are a bit of a grey area here, but it is important to see where this is going.

Still, if you have additional concerns, I think the best place to discuss them is on Meta Stack Exchange. Let me know if you make a new question there.

Thank you. I'll read follow ups on meta. Right to be forgotten is voluntary one, so probably more fuss than it is worth.

@ryan yes, there is, it is called Diagonal Sudoku.

@Discretelizard how do you like being a moderator? Is this what you have expected?

@Evil I'm enjoying the more effective moderation tools without having to answer a zillion questions. This means that most of my interaction has shifted from answers to comments, but I think that is at some points more appropriate. I had expected more work and more troublesome users (although while usually silent, the seem to come in waves...), but it's a lot less than I expected.

Oh, better that way, otherwise it would be a lot of work or trouble.

Yes. It helps that we're a site on a technical topic where the people who answer usually do not have any strong opinions they're basing their answer on. (unlike, say, Physics) I would not want to be a mod on Physics, a lot of users that are being very annoying there.

@Evil Well it's removed now. I didn't know what they meant either. I'm not sure if they fully understood what they meant? It was very confusing

@ryan it was p vs np by reducing sudoku algorithm to 3sat. Some definitions got confused.

I have adviced to delete it, when OP asked if it is good idea.

He can enter chat now, meybe if definitions get sorted out he will get what he wants to know.

@Discretelizard hey congrats also on your new position, glad to hear its going smoothly/ well. saw you get in some impassioned debates over in Quantum Computing chat awhile back and thought you had natural/ standout/ passionate leadership qualities :)

@vzn Thanks. I guess I've mostly earned some experience there on how to argue when no-one else seems to support your position and are not willing to entertain it. Looking back, I think I was a bit too passionate at times.

@Discretelizard yw! wow! a mod who can demonstrate some flexibility. luv it + plz dont lose it... its not always an easy job & do appreciate yours + others efforts on it. :)

@ryan I cannot respond to your flag directly, so I will just mention it here. In general, we do not delete posts that have been considered 'useful' (as in, received positive votes) unless there is a particularly good reason to do so. Deleting that question would delete multiple answers, which is why the system does not allow the owner of the question to delete their post.

If your main concern is that people will get 'lost' by taking their post too seriously, feel free to edit some sort of disclaimer at the top of the post.

Although I personally think that the number of downvotes is enough warning.

@Discretelizard My main concern is that the post basically seems deprecated now. Based on OP's edit, there isn't really a question, it's just a collection of answers to question that isn't there. Maybe deleting isn't the best option, but rather leaving in OP's disclaimer and reverting back to the original question so users can at least see what the answers pertain to.

Nevermind lol, I see that's what you just did.