Deleting a Member

[Rip Taylors Confetti]

I have a tough situation...hopefully not so tough for everyone here!

I have a member on my forums who has requested we delete his account and posts. Problem is, he is the OP for several large threads. It appears if I delete his OPs, the threads are removed. Manually editing his posts would be extremely time consuming, as he has over 10,000. Is there a workaround for this?

[Kindred]

No...   If you delete the original post, you must delete the entire thread... Period.

The solution?   Don't delete them. Tell the user that posts in conversations will not be deleted as that would make the conversations not-understandable.

[Rip Taylors Confetti]

That's as may be, but I am going to do this anyway. It seems I can just split the topics off after the OP for all the major ones and then delete the orphan OP.

Next question--if the member we are talking about happens to be the board creator and first account, will deleting them screw up the board? They are no longer an admin at their request, but I just don't want some weird ownership privileges bug messing things up if I nuke their account.

[Illori]

there is nothing "special" about the account that is initially created. deleting it etc will not break anything.

[Rip Taylors Confetti]

Good to know, thanks!

[Rip Taylors Confetti]

I split the threads he started and deleted his threads and posts via the delete user function. We now seem to be getting an error where when you click "new" it takes you to the very last post in the thread instead of the last one you read before. But I cannot verify this is never happened before, and they were not in threads I had split, just ones he posted in.

[Kindred]

well, that makes sense...

you split the posts.   this creates a new thread... with a new ID.
that means that any "read marker" which a user might have had in the old thread is no longer valid, because the original thread ID no longer exists.

[Rip Taylors Confetti]

I was also told this by a user:

If you go to my post history and click on my post in the 2016 Pres Election (should be my 3rd one down from this one), it brings you to page 182 of that thread and my post is not there. That's probably where it was before his posts were nuked. My post is now actually located on page 180, fourth post from the bottom.

Is there any way of fixing any of this or do we just have to live with it?

[Arantor]

Well, you deleted his posts. It makes sense that if you had for example 100 posts in a thread, showing 10 per pages you get 10 pages of posts, but if you remove 20 posts from it, you won't still have 10 pages of posts anymore...

[Kindred]

right...   you basically ignored the advice give and went ahead...    you're basically stuck with it now.

[qc]

Still, he brings up a valid point: Splitting a thread should "copy" the read-marker for all users to the new thread. Also, splitting a thread or deleting posts from a thread should not lead to "dangling pointers" from a member's post history and should probably be considered a bug of SMF 2.0.x (don't know about 2.1).

[Kindred]

ell, maybe, maybe not.   I tend to disagree since it would be database intensive for an edge case

It seriously makes complete sense to me.
If you split the thread, it creates a new thread ID.
So, any bookmarks to the old ID will be broken...
Any read markers apply to the old thread, not the new thread....   And trying to keep track of what messages were read, especially if some posts are split and some not would be a nightmare.

So, consider it a bug if you want, but I would argue that it is a waste of effort to address it and it should just be accepted.

[qc]

@Kindred Will a user want to re-read postings after their topic has been split? Shall links from the post history be broken? No? Then there is an opportunity to make SMF even better, yay! Even though I understand why that seems like a waste of effort to some

(technically I am with you though, this issue is of lowest priority)

[Arantor]

None of the major forum software, last I checked anyway, handles that case precisely because it is intensive. It's also complicated because SMF has two separate read logs to pull from.

[qc]

I just wanted to point out how we can chose to see the fun, challenging aspect of building better software as opposed to staying within our (developer's) comfort zone. Not that I am any better myself, but I can still point it out

Whether it is intensive or not - well, SMF already has global message IDs, which would probably allow fixing the "dangling pointer" problem without requiring critical changes.

When creating a new topic by splitting an existing topic, the per-topic/per-user "read"-marker could be set to the earlierst unread post of that new topic. This of course doesn't scale too well with the number of users.

It is a bit off-topic here, but I noticed the following: I can't easily contribute / send pull requests to the current branch of SMF due to there being no public SMF 2.0.x repository - while the 2.1 branch is unattractive to me because I can't use it in production and thus have no incentive to get invested into its codebase.... not sure if that helps anyone, but I still wanted to write it down as feedback to the SMF project team.