After seeing some examples of what happens when an account is deleted, I think I'd much prefer that the username be kept in place. For one thing, I don't see any real purpose or benefit to obscuring the username.
Take for example the quote in the following post (and several subsequent posts in the same thread):
http://discuss.flarum.org/d/299/url/6
The quote refers to the username "barbie", which has now been deleted. So in this case, it's not as if the username has been effectively hidden (assuming that was the goal of the deletion). Such inconsistency serves no one.
Things could become even worse in a situation where a thread contains posts by two or three (or more!) different users who have deleted their accounts. You'd end up with a number of posts by someone named [deleted] and no way to tell whether those posts were written by one person or many (and if the latter, which was written by whom). This sort of thing can easily turn an informative and helpful thread into an insoluble puzzle that will be useless to remaining members of the forum.
... I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I don't think the ability to delete an account is necessary. An account is not something that belongs to a user; it's a resource that the forum operator permits the user to use. (Perhaps that's why we call them users and not owners. 😉 )
That being the case, I can't understand all the concern for the needs of the person who wants to delete his account. What about the needs of everybody else who uses the forum? Shouldn't they be able to read threads without spending hours trying to puzzle out who said what?
