RFC: Paid users can request immediate account deletion (instead of 7d delay)
Request for comments
Need
On Wednesday 10-May, a feature flag was enabled, Enable delay delete own user. This feature causes the user-account to wait 7d in a pending state before it is actually deleted. Technically, the account is in a blocked
state for those 7d. Since the flag was enabled, Support has had several tickets from users who are blocked from re-creating their own account after they deleted it (examples: 407244, 406483, 406088). Currently there is no workflow for Support to respond to these tickets. This RFC is to identify and document a workflow for this situation.
There appear to be some valid use cases for self-deletion, so we do need a way to respond here:
- SCIM is being added by the organization, but the user already had a gitlab.com account so it needs to be deleted and re-provisioned under SCIM
- user error during migration from SM to SaaS
Approach
GitLab.com Admins are able to immediately delete the account, bypassing the 7d wait period. Paid users should be able to request immediate deletion. Free users can be excluded because this is manual work for Customer Support Engineering.
New proposed workflow:
- User opens a Support ticket; SE verifies the problem is related to the account being blocked.
- SE confirms the user is connected to a paid group.
- SE confirms the presence of the Admin note
User deleted own account on {timestamp}
(this means the user initiated the self-serve deletion.) - SE uses the macro
Support::SaaS::Blocked Accounts::Blocked due to account deletion
to reply to the ticket, which adds the tagspt_meta_5144
and asks for explicit permission from the user to bypass the 7d wait period and delete the account. - When confirmation is received, SE (with Admin access) deletes the account.
- SE updates the ticket with the result of the deletion.
Benefit
Users can regain access to their gitlab.com account. Excluding Free users minimizes the additional workload for the Support team.
Competition / Alternatives
- Do nothing and continue to have Slack conversations like this one (expires 2023-09-17).