Wikia talk:Central user pages
Wikia - creating communities
My feeling is that it's unkind and unnecessary to delete the user page of a genuine or potential Wikia user. They may be editing other Wikia wikis, in which case, it makes sense for them to want a central user page too. Alternatively, they might be new to Wikia and just doing what you would expect to do on many other websites - make a profile.
It's probably not worth keeping images of inactive users here, especially since they're not free content, but I do think there is benefit to keeping their user pages. Users ought to feel welcomed into the community and they will feel more a part of it if they can have a user page. This need not be restricted to people who are editing this wiki. Over 90% of people here are readers, not editors, but that doesn't mean they can't take the first step towards becoming a contriutor, and making a user page is one way of doing that.
External links could be removed if someone really thinks they don't belong here, but we use rel=nofollow here, so it's not doing them any good if they're looking for SEO and it's not doing us any harm.
I feel an {{i}}-type template is too harsh when most users are not doing anything wrong. It's quite common to make profiles on wikis - that's what user pages are for and I think there's need to be a good reason to delete them. It's not like we're running out of space, and it's not like they're affecting anything else - no other pages would go there anyway.
Please do not bite the newcomers or delete their profiles. :)