Deleting your Shelf-Lives account

Ask us, and we will do it. Say which email address the account uses so we know which one to close.

We have not published a contact address yet. That is a gap we know about and it is being fixed; until it is here, this page cannot tell you where to write, and we would rather say so than print an address that goes nowhere.

To be straight with you: there is no delete button in the game yet. The code that does the deleting is written, tested and ready, but nothing on screen calls it, so right now it takes a person on our end running it for you. A button is coming and this page will change the day it lands.

It happens in two steps, in this order, and the second one always runs even if the first found nothing left to do.

First, everything in your account. The account record goes, and the database removes everything attached to it in the same operation:

• your shelf
• every game in your collection, with its play states and dates
• every Ghost Box you were tracking
• every honor you were awarded
• every rating and every word of feedback you left
• every funnel record about your play (the ones that never held an IP address in the first place)
• your supporter shirt and the record of how it was granted

Second, the login behind it. Your email address, your name, your password hash, every session you have open anywhere, every password reset link still in flight, and every Google or Facebook sign-in you had linked. All of it goes, and your email address is free to use again from that moment.

That second step exists because it once did not. For a while, deleting an account stopped after the first step: the login survived, the person could still sign in, they reached nothing, and their email address stayed occupied so they could never come back. It was fixed, and running deletion on an account caught by that old fault repairs it.

Five things outlive the account. We would rather you knew which, and why, before you decide.

1. What you said in the channel. The community channel is a transcript. Your lines stay as written, under the name you were using at the moment you wrote them, because a conversation that quietly rewrote itself once one person left would stop being a record of what happened. The lines do not belong to your account: they belong to the channel, which is why the deletion never reaches them. Post accordingly. The same goes for the small presence row that showed you were around.

2. The name you claimed. Here is one we are not proud of. Names are held once across the whole community so that two people cannot answer to the same one, and that record lives with the community rather than with you. Deleting the account does not release it today, so the name stays taken, including from you if you come back. That is a gap rather than a decision, we know about it, and we will fix it. Until then, ask us when you ask for the deletion and we will clear it by hand.

3. Ko-fi receipts.If you ever bought us a coffee, a receipt stays. It exists so that Ko-fi resending the same notification cannot grant a second shirt, and so we can answer, months later, why we did what we did about a payment. It holds four things: Ko-fi’s transaction id, when it arrived, what kind of payment it was, and our decision as one word from a fixed list. There is no name in it, no email address, no amount and none of your words. It is not a record of you; it is a record of a decision.

4. A supporter grant nobody ever claimed. If a payment named an email address that no account here was ever using, the waiting grant is keyed by that address and is not attached to anybody, so there is nothing for a deletion to cascade into. It clears itself 180 days after it was made. A grant your account did claim goes with the account.

5. A few background event rows. When a Ghost Box became a real game on your shelf, the product wrote a durable note to itself so the work would finish even if the server fell over mid-way. Those notes carry internal ids, no names and no content, and after a deletion the ids point at nothing that exists. They are plumbing, and we have not built anything that sweeps them up yet.

Our database host takes its own backups on its own schedule. A row deleted from the live database can still sit inside a backup taken before you asked, until that backup ages out. Nobody reads a backup except to recover from a disaster, and we cannot reach into one to remove a single row.

Our hosting provider also keeps ordinary request logs, the way every host does. Those are not joined up with your account and they age out on their own.

Deleting here removes the link between that provider and this product, and removes the provider’s id for you from our database. It does not touch your Google or Facebook account, which is not ours to touch, and it never could: we never stored a token that would let us reach into it.

If you would also like to remove Shelf-Lives from your side, both providers keep a list of connected apps in their own account settings, and removing us there is a single click that we have no part in.

You can ask for a copy of your Shelf-Lives data before it goes: your shelf, your collection, your Ghost Boxes, your feedback and your own funnel records, with no internal identifiers in it. Ask in the same message.

The same honesty applies here: the code that assembles the copy is written and ready, and nothing on screen calls it yet either, so it takes a person on our end.

There is no grace period, no recycle bin and no restore. When it runs, the rows are gone from the live database in one operation. Asking twice is harmless: the second run finds nothing and does nothing.