Are you in a situation where you can't delete your unused accounts ?

[linuxyogi]

Are you in a situation where you have registered to a lot of forums which you don't use anymore and there is no way to delete your account ?

[sudodus]

I would not worry unless one of my accounts is abused.

By the way, I think the Ubuntu Forum accounts are anonymized if the user wants to get rid of them (but spam or troll accounts are moved to a 'jail' location by the admins so removed from the public).

[sdsurfer]

For forums, this is by design (but depending on the forum configuration, can be allowed.) Deleting a user would mean deleting all the content they have posted. There have been a couple forums I have been on that have allowed it, most don't.

Forum posts are content, which plays into a lot of marketing strategies (content is still king.) It also has a value aspect to users, I cannot count the times I have had a problem to solve and found some old post that led me in the right direction. The irony is that on a few occasions, the post was by me! :-D

If you can't delete the account and still have access, or access to the email to recover access, you should still be able to modify the account and change the user name, which is the best you can hope for.

<rant>
For non-forum accounts, this is one of the most frustrating a webmaster/developer can introduce. There is nothing worse than making a one-off purchase, getting spammed by the service, then being told you have to log in to modify or remove the account when you never even created the account. This results in hours of going through loops that lead you back to the same place. Not a whole lotta love found in resolving.
</rant>