Still a problem with members passing

[Jeff]

Again, one of our great members has passed away and I can't do anything suitable with her account.

If I delete or suspend her account this carries an inference that is not suitable.

What would be best it to be able to freeze the account, leave all content in place, with a custom message that appears on her page and when another member tries to interact. I could then write something suitable.

Surely many other NC's have this problem.

Just ignoring the situation is so impersonal and hardly what I would expect on a 'social network'.

[Eric Suesz]

Sorry, Jeff. We don't have any plans to create a special membership state for deceased members. 

[Jeff]

What is the general approach by network owners, in your experience?

[Cautious]

Jeff, I made a Tribute Page for my member that passed suddenly.  We left her page up for a month (until the Tribute Page was designed and up running and then removed it   It will be one year the 26th of this month.  We will be posting a tribute to her memory at that time. 

[Jeff]

Cautious, what did you do with her content. My member has a lot of discussions, photos etc. All valuable to other members.

[Kim Newberg aka imagesbykim]

Yes, I too have a member that recently passed and my worry is that someone will send out a message to her and the family will receive it.

This member has so much valuable and inspirational content that I dont want to lose it and I know that we dont want to just delete her.

I havent even been able to send out a message to all of our members because the deceased member's family would receive a copy of the broadcast.

A horrible thought that there is nothing in consideration of this type of situation.

kim

[Jeff]

It is a paradox of society. We are told all the time about the things that we should do, shouldn't do, but at the same time we manage to pretend that dead won't happen to us, or that it is something we shouldn't talk about too much because it is negative.

Dead happens to us all, no exception. In any society it is happening all the time, including online societies.

I would love to know, of the millions of accounts on Facebook, how many users are actually no longer alive. I suspect the percentage is very similar to the general death rate.

According to Wikipedia, a crude death rate for the world is 8.37 per 1000. I think I read Facebook has 800 million active users.

After 1 year 66+ million of those active users have passed away. Are their accounts still active? Well, how easy is it to deactivate an account after you have passed away?

What has Ning put in place to allow for this, seriously?

[Peter Matthews]

A general solution, short of 'suspending' members, would be to give NCs the ability to place members in an NC created category and then enrol them in a group for each created category. For those who have passed away, a category could be made called "Away" or "Remembered" or similar.

The same function would have other useful purposes too, for featuring members in multiple different ways. At the moment we can only feature members in one and the same featured list, without any explanation. If we could feature them into a variety of feature groups, this would be a powerful new function for our social networks.

I have about 5000 members, so probably several are dead but I don't know about it. That is our other problem. The dead cannot send us an update.

[Jeff]

Hi Peter

You would still need to deal with the issues with notification messages mentioned by Kim, members commenting on walls or the members posts, photos etc.

The husband of my neighbour passed just recently and she has received numerous mail, email and physical, to him directly. She is struggling with his loss and having to contend with these as well.

We need to be able to disable all interaction by other members, as well as somehow clearly advise members this person has passed. And not just with a broadcast, it needs to be permanently on their profile so any person at any time is informed of the situation.

BTW, according to stats, in the last year at least 40 of your members have passed.

Yes, you are exactly right, we don't always know. Not sure we can do anything about that.

[Clark P]

Would it be possible for a NC to be able to edit the text on the profile page of a member that has been "suspended" but their content retained?  Right now it says "Denver Finch is no longer a member of Social Superstars."  Could the NC edit that verbiage on a profile-by-profile basis?  Just put a text/html box in right there.

This way, a member who has passed could be 'suspended' (while keeping their content) and a tribute/explanation given on their profile page.  If this were possible, no family member would receive any notices to that member nor would anyone be able to send anything to them or comment on their profile page.

What do you think?  Passing members will be a fact as long as there are communities.  This minor addition of an editable field on the suspended profile page would allow us to gracefully deal with that.

[liz4cps]

I'm going to try a member category for this.  I have just created one called, "Gone Home" with a badge on the top left of their avatar with a cross on it.  I'm hoping that will at least help members to see that they are no longer with us.

We are a site with folks for chronic illness and had an admin die suddenly this week and another member last month.  The latter's birthday is today and people who don't know she's died were wishing her happy birthday...  So, it seems like a lot right now.  I would like to put a banner across the top of the member's page, as well, but we can't, of course.