The current process is:
When a business owner is soft deleted and the ''assign To'' field is filled in, the Communities are put into a trash state. After 30 days the user is hard deleted. Then on the 90th day the content is transferred to the person that was in the ''Assign To'' Field.
Customer can soft delete and then hard delete right after (you must fill in the AssignTo field again) to make this process go faster. The reason why customer might see a Community in trash even they've assigned the content to another owner (Assign To field) is because the user can be restored within 30 days.
Plus even if the 30 days passed and the user is hard deleted the content will not be transferred until the 90th day.
If customer want the content to get transferred faster then they need to do a hard delete (making sure to again use the Assign To Field) within the 30 day window.
Deleting accounts and transferring content
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSL3JX/admin/bss/topics/deleting_users.html
There are two methods for deleting a user and transferring their files to someone else. This task describes how to set a soft delete.
Soft Delete: When you move a user to Trash and reassign their files to another user, Connections performs a "soft delete" in which you have 30 days either to restore the user, with all of their files (in case the deletion was accidental), or to perform a hard delete. If you take no further action within the 30 days, after 90 days the account is permanently deleted and reassigned files are transferred to the new user; any files that were not reassigned (and so are still assigned to the original user) are deleted.
Hard Delete: If you decide to permanently delete a user and reassign their files, a "hard delete" is performed. The user account is immediately deleted and reassigned files are transferred to the new user.
IBM you should fix this problem as soon as possible. We've faced this problem several times this year. Can you imagine how frustrating and upsetting it is when communities just disappear into the trash just because the business owner leaves the company? Do you know how often this happens per year and how many calls we get because of this ridiculous process. It would make more sense if the business owner role were automatically transferred to an existing owner.
IBM it is a shame that you do not fix this process! There is a major risk of data loss and upset community owners.
We have had owners leave who published content from My page and never uploaded within the community. After they left all the content was no longer accessible.
When Content is uploaded to a community it should remain accessible by community members and the owners should have access to remove edit the content.