I wonder how can I cease my membership voluntarily? Whether I am moving away from Thailand or have lost interest or have an alternative resource to meet my living-in-thailand questions or just plain bored with the banter here...how do I cease to be a member, when and if I choose to do so?

And upon cessation, does my username become available again? Do all my past posts get deleted?

You just cease posting when you want. Posts remain and no new member will be assigned your name and you can return at any time if you wish.

You just cease posting when you want. Posts remain and no new member will be assigned your name and you can return at any time if you wish.

This is to keep up the apparent Thaivisa membership to look good for advertisers, I guess. Once you're in, you're in for good.

Actually, if you think about it, threads involve members posting, responding, quoting. If those posts were to be deleted, it would require going in and manually deleting any response wouldn't it? then the thread would make no sense whatsoever. We don't delete posts wholesale for the simple fact it would render most threads nonsensical.

If departing members could just decide to delete all their posts when they go, it would leave holes in all the threads in which they posted. Other members posts and even whole threads could become meaningless and confusing.

You get a short leeway to amend your posts, but then thats it.

In a way it's a bit like real life in the forum, once you have said something it's out there forever, you can't take it back. You can only wait for people's memories to fade and the threads to slip way back in the queue.

Anyway, unless you were paticularly special in some way, no one will remember you, or what you said, down the track.

Edit: noticed the mods explained this while I was writing.

just go apeshit and get banned.

If departing members could just decide to delete all their posts when they go, it would leave holes in all the threads in which they posted. Other members posts and even whole threads could become meaningless and confusing.

You get a short leeway to amend your posts, but then thats it.

In a way it's a bit like real life in the forum, once you have said something it's out there forever, you can't take it back. You can only wait for people's memories to fade and the threads to slip way back in the queue.

Anyway, unless you were paticularly special in some way, no one will remember you, or what you said, down the track.

Edit: noticed the mods explained this while I was writing.

not really, it is out there for as long as the you know who dont do you know what, cant say any more, being watched carefully

You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave!

Yes, doggie888888, 1000 years from now, mutated people-roaches^TM on Mars will be using your posts as subjects of their theses. Resistance is futile.

LOL, thanks all for the repiles. Not only did it answer my question, some replies did bring out a chuckle. Thanks again.:jap:

Yeah I've found it odd too that you cannot leave. In this technological age I would have thought you could leave/delete your profile but your posts would stay. Seems a bit odd that once in, in for life.

I would have thought that since the Mods can suspend/ban members and their previous posts do stay then perhaps asking for a lifetime ban would do the trick. Can't see why that wouldn't work.

It would also be less misleading to advertisers in knowing that the 'real' membership numbers are.

Yeah I've found it odd too that you cannot leave. In this technological age I would have thought you could leave/delete your profile but your posts would stay. Seems a bit odd that once in, in for life.

I would have thought that since the Mods can suspend/ban members and their previous posts do stay then perhaps asking for a lifetime ban would do the trick. Can't see why that wouldn't work.

It would also be less misleading to advertisers in knowing that the 'real' membership numbers are.

Are u serious - a mate of mine has had lifteime bans loads of times. Try it - get a lifetime ban and try using your old login ID and it will say something like (this ID is being used). Like I said before, once they've got u in you can't leave - it's good to show the advertisers that they have such a high membership even if a proportion have been banned forever. It's called a 'good business model' .

Only one member ever left taking his posts with him as far as I know.....

Why would you want to take your posts, are you going to advertise them forsale on http://classifieds.thaivisa.com/ or maybe auction them on Ebay ?

I believe there have been cases where members have accidentally left personal details in posts and have had them removed by mods on request. One or two members also were posting far too much controversial stuff (you can probably guess the subject matter) and so the safest option was to delete all their posts to guarantee nothing incriminating would be left on the forum. Other than special cases like these, I don't think posts are generally deleted en masse for the other reasons mentioned earlier.

Also, to get a true picture of how many "real" members there are, just do a search for all members with less than 1 post, and you will see that almost 72,000 members have 0 posts to their name, or around 55% of the total membership.