I probably can't count the number of times MFAS has asked me to delete his membership. Back with the phpBB board I could activate, deactivate, ban or delete a membership. The problem with that was that it created missing conversations and relevance in threads when a person was deleted. Banning only worked on people that didn't keep coming back, as they'd just come back with a new name like Sooty, or Brisbaneguy or KJUN12 or something witty like that. So I deactivated them so that when they came back the day after tomorrow looking to come back, as MFAS did repeatedly...I'd simply reactivate them again. If they rejoined under a new name, the system would tell me they were back...and I'd deactivate them again. Unfortunately, when we switched over to Vbulletin...the members in the deactivated bin were reactivated because there was no deactivated function with Vbulletin. With Vbulletin, when a member is deleted their conversation remains...but it will show as being authored by guest. When you go back to those old threads you probably won't be able to keep track of who said what, especially if someone in the conversation is still here under the same or different member name. I believe when we mapped over to Vbulletin we were going to stitch the old posts to the member names of the members that were deleted, by Neal. I believe we {Moses} stitched Smiles together after many hours of work, but we didn't take on the huge task of stitching more back together. As well, this Vbulletin allows Moses to combine memberships together of people that have more than one membership in the system, including those people who rejoined thinking we lost there old membership.
I hope this helps!
Surfcrest