This is T34815: Add user preference to deactivate/delete user account I think.

A change like this needs community consensus. Perhaps a global RFC on meta?

Masumrezarock100, why does whether or not a user could block themselves need community consensus? Sorry, not trying to be argumentative, sincere question.

@Valereee It's not the blocking themselves that requires consensus (there's basically already a consensus for it if they can be requested), it's the not having it appear on your block record (and thus being able to avoid any kind of scrutiny) that would require consensus.

Well, on English Wikipedia anyway. I'm not sure if self-requested blocks are available on other wikis. If they aren't, we'd need a consensus to make a software change that would enable this on other projects also.

@Izno Not the same. What you linked would essentially be the ability to delete your account; this is just the ability for non-admins to impose wikibreaks on themselves without needing to involve others in the process.

"Disabling an account" I see as functionally the same end-state. "I don't want to use this account (right now)."

This is pretty simple if its okay to add a log entry

In T239537#5703342, @Valereee wrote:

Masumrezarock100, why does whether or not a user could block themselves need community consensus? Sorry, not trying to be argumentative, sincere question.

Because it could be abused. If a hacker hacks someone's account, they can abuse this feature. I am not aware of all methods to abuse this feature. A community discussion would list all pros and cons.

Thanks, I see. Hm. My main concern is that requesting a self-block is seen as needy, but maybe if everyone could do it any time they wanted, it wouldn't be seen that way. Maybe having it on the block log is not really a problem. And I can see how not having it there might cause unpredictable concerns. Like someone could block themselves pre-emptively because they think a block is coming, and that way they avoid an administrative block on their account. Yeah, that actually is probably a bad idea. It needs to be on the block log.

Val

ETA: I tried to edit the request to strike the block log out, but obviously I don't know how

In T239537#5703678, @Masumrezarock100 wrote:

In T239537#5703342, @Valereee wrote:

Masumrezarock100, why does whether or not a user could block themselves need community consensus? Sorry, not trying to be argumentative, sincere question.

Because it could be abused. If a hacker hacks someone's account, they can abuse this feature. I am not aware of all methods to abuse this feature. A community discussion would list all pros and cons.

Tagging Platform Engineering to see if they have any comment.

So, we do have the concept of a wikibreak, which is probably a really healthy thing for a lot of users to plan and take. There are even tools like the Wikibreak Enforcer that help enforce these kinds of breaks.

We'd probably need some guidance from community folks in Product team to know exactly how to proceed. It seems like a "block" is a heavyweight tool for this, and we may want to look at other flows to make it work.

I'm untagging CPT until we're sure this a task that needs low-level platform support.