BuddyPress.org

Hi @hatherley

security [at] wordpress.org is the place to contact about this kind of thing.

@hatherley redirects is one option. A hackish approach would be to create a new user with the username that was deleted. And just let it sit there idol – as an unused member. That should stop the broken links.

@hatherley just to add – if you allow members to delete their profile then there is no way you can avoid 404s if any inbound links exist to the deleted profile.

The only effective solution I can think of is to disallow profile deletions (as I mentioned above).

@hatherley you could do a manual clean-up then going forward disallow members from deleting their account (you can do this under BP Settings in WP Admin)