You can report a post if you are being harassed. You've only started doing that this morning.

Here is the breakdown when it comes to deleting accounts on this site:

If you have posted in the forum and other members have responded to your posts then you cannot delete your account. There are two reasons for this.

1. If your account and your posts are removed then some threads may become disjointed if someone is replying to a post that is no longer there.

2. Someone may sign up with the same screen name you were using and try to impersonate you after your account has been deleted.

It is recommended that you simply abandon the account and it will eventually fade into the archives. Also make sure that no personal information is displayed in your forum profile, like displaying your email address or instant messaging contacts, or in your signature. You can also report any post that has your photo or personal information listed and those posts will be removed.

Having said that, there are always exceptions. I can give you two examples:

There was a celebrity on this site who was about to draw some national media attention and some enterprising blogger was able to link them to this site. Apparently they used the same screen name on another site; and used the same unique writing style and signature. A Google search on that screen name would bring up posts from both sites.

If that story broke in the mainstream media it would have hurt the celebrity and this site. So their request was honored and their screen name and posts were scrubbed from the site.

In another case, there was a member who got married and they were worried that their spouse could do a search and read some personal things they had written about their past. They used the same screen name on various sites and their spouse knew the screen name. They also had a lot of posts on this site.

What we did in this case was to change the screen name (which changes the name on every post). Their original screen name was put on the block list so no one could use it in the future.

Personal ads can be deleted by the owner at will.

Concerning search engines, a change was made on the site after the following incident:

A college sports figure had a personal ad on this site for about two years. He was about to go pro and removed his ad while he was in contract negotiations. However, a search on his name still brought up the ad in Google's cache -- even though it was removed from the site. We had to petition Google to scrub it from their cache before its expiration date.

A change was made so that personal ads on this site are no longer indexed by search engines. The forums are indexed but will generally not display in top search engine listings unless the search criteria is very specific.

I hope that covers it.