There are three edge cases to end of life exits of a named member on Boxtag.
The first is lurking. A member may choose to go dark or participate at a low level with a limited number of weigh-ins on a comment. If they volunteer to do so, it should be indicated in their profile and perhaps visually with their visible votes / weigh-ins on comments. Six months is a reasonable period for them to be inactive without changing their status. Lurking periods may be recorded if it can be done efficiently.
The second is proxy. A proxy is a high level change of ownership of the member. In order to preserve the anonymity of someone who wishes to disown their prior comments and votes, they may elect to proxy to an anonymous identity. In this case, in order to preserve the integrity of conversations, the ownership of those comments and votes is turned over to the system. An anonymized account is given as the pseudonym of the member and all PII associated with the original member is erased and delinked. While someone might make a screenshot of an original comment or a person might become notorious for a comment attributed to them before the proxy, the system will not allow that to be proven.
The final is the scribble. A scribble essentially is a non-reversible disconnection of OPs, comments and votes from their contexts. (Votes? box-votes? ). In the case of a scribble, the original content will be preserved, but all comments are delinked from OPs and votes given and received are deactivated from tallies. Essentially the system will have to recalculate the dimensional scores of all entities. This recalculation is something done regularly so those associated with scribbling should not be taxing on the system.
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