When I was looking for a solution to my problem I saw a user on an answer with no link visible:

greyed-out user with no profile link

What is going on here?

share
95  
That is a very well drawn question mark. –  Andy Jun 27 '14 at 12:24
12  
@Andy: I would suspect the work was being outsourced. –  PlasmaHH Jun 27 '14 at 12:49
1  
@Andy I didn't use image in my question it is edited another user –  Ayaz Shah Jun 27 '14 at 12:55
9  
@Andy But thats Martijn Pieters! Do you think that he will draw bad question mark? –  nicael Jun 27 '14 at 15:49
    
Was that question mark drawn with Microsoft paint? Because that's probably one of the best drawn question marks I've seen in a while –  l46kok Jun 28 '14 at 16:33

2 Answers 2

up vote 57 down vote accepted

That is a deleted user account. When a user is deleted, any answers (and questions with a score of 0 or up) are retained under the CC license.

With the user account gone, there is nothing to link to anymore, and all reputation and badges are gone with the account. All that can be shown is the original user id of the account that created the post.

share
1  
Is this a user deleting their account, or an admin deleting their account? If it's an admin, this would be removing attribution without the author's consent, which would be a problem if the particular license was for attribution. IDK if that's the flavor of CC license being used here though. It can be something of a mine field. –  AaronLS Jun 27 '14 at 19:36
3  
@AaronLS: I don't know. But destroying an account (removing it without consent from the author) is reserved for spammers and obvious troll accounts. I am 99.9% certain this is the account owner requesting deletion. –  Martijn Pieters Jun 27 '14 at 19:37
    
@AaronLS When you post to SE you transfer all rights to the post from yourself to SE, so I don't think it would matter. –  Seth Jun 27 '14 at 23:20
6  
@Seth No, you do not transfer your copyright to Stack Exchange when you post here. You retain your copyright, and you agree to license your post to Stack Exchange under CC BY-SA 3.0. –  Chris Jester-Young Jun 28 '14 at 4:53
    
@ChrisJester-Young I wasn't really referring to "copyrights". Anyway, I was pretty sure that SE owns all the content posted on their site.. Let me see if I can find my references. –  Seth Jun 28 '14 at 5:01
1  
@Seth This is an old myth that won't die. See this answer and this answer. –  David Moles Jun 28 '14 at 22:27
1  
damn, with all the licensing system :P ! –  PaRiMaL RaJ Jun 29 '14 at 16:55

One more thing not mentioned: if a post is migrated from one site to another and a user that comments/edits/asks/answers on that question doesn't have an account on the site it is migrated to, it shows up like they don't have an account.

Like mentioned, it can also be deletion.

share
4  
I think their name shows up though (not clickable) if it's a migration though. –  starsplusplus Jun 28 '14 at 23:51
    
@starsplusplus [misread that at first] but that is true (although some users stick to the userXXXXXX pattern for their username) –  Annonomus Penguin Jun 29 '14 at 11:38
    
"some users stick to the userXXXXXX pattern" Ughh.. it makes them look like convicts. What, they can't even think up an anonymous name like 'Annonomus Penguin'? (..that's v. cool, BTW) –  Andrew Thompson Jun 29 '14 at 16:45

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261767/why-is-there-a-user-without-profile-link-reputation-and-badges-on-stack-overflo/261768
meta.stackoverflow.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-06
84094
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:QIQQH64NTPO5HABJ3BHLQSQVIO5UVHSK
<urn:uuid:e281d44a-603e-45fd-b59d-b0c8c52d70ed>
2015-01-28T22:46:55Z
198.252.206.140
sha1:MDRD457LW5D7FDMM35GDWDG4EKVRMN44
<urn:uuid:6bd07b11-849d-475f-a760-4e253875ce2f>
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261767/why-is-there-a-user-without-profile-link-reputation-and-badges-on-stack-overflo/261768
response
<urn:uuid:e308ff4d-bba7-4223-b309-d0f6307b492f>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-212-252.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-06
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for January 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf