Death of a community member

On the E-Mint listserv there’s a discussion about what happens after the death of a community member. Should their profile be taken down? Can the next of kin access their email?

My story involves the death of a prominent member, waybackmachine ,
wiki and transfer of websites.

A prominent member of uk cider stopped posting for several months
and people began to inquire after him. Eventually his wife found the
group and explained that he had been in a car accident and was
recovering very slowly. Then we heard that he suddenly died of a heart
attack.

I was approached by a couple of members who were concerned that
Paul’s own website and accumulated content should not be lost to
posterity and they tried writing to his wife as tactfully as possible,
but understandably she had bigger worries at the time.

So I created a wiki page linked from the members page, which contains
tributes written by the group as a reaction to hearing the tragic
news, and links to Paul’s site as archived on the “waybackmachine”
where I assume the content will remain indefinitely, even if the
original site is taken down. It’s the saddest task for a facilitator,
but seemed very necessary.

http://tinyurl.com/ypmsf8

http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Paul_Gunningham_In_Memorium

Interestingly I later discovered that the domain names and content had
passed on to another small scale web developer in a similar niche. I
don’t know how this was arranged, but I assume it was agreed with the
next of kin.

If somebody dies owning domain names and nobody inherits them, then
they eventually expire and come up for resale. There are then
companies who specialise in auctioning off the means to acquire them.