This already has been talked about ...

First of all, there has to be a way to delete user, before you can think about pruning ...

I already asked, what exactly is the problem with deleting users, and as far as I see it, there a no real technical problems, only cosmetical ones ...

I know how communities work, and without the opportunity to delete/prune users, dead accounts keep piling up and unnecessarily blow up the database ..
(I´ve seen that on my mainpage, 4000 active users and at least 16000 dead accounts over the last 5 years, without pruning/deleting users it would have been impossible to keep the site running )

and status on this Suspen user module?


Im thinking of a "addon" to the Core / admin panel. Where u can get a list of users and last time they were online - and then select the inactive users and choose: Suspend account.



something like that crappy MS paint made picture.
No auto Pruning or suspension, but kind of manual so that u dont get lots of database querrys every day just looking for if its been X days since user Y signed in.

The MS Analysis add-on has a facility for pruning members based on date - if people want to bypass what Dragonfly does then try MS Analysis.

Gallowglas wrote:

First of all, there has to be a way to delete user, before you can think about pruning ... I already asked, what exactly is the problem with deleting users, and as far as I see it, there a no real technical problems, only cosmetical ones ...

As far as I understand, the technical problem is how to tell ALL modules that store information created by a single user whose record is being deleted to remove those records as well. This doesn't apply to just the forums or to coppermine. Sure, it would be easy to create a function that altered or removed forum posts created by a user being deleted. The same applies for Coppermine. Those modules are shipped with Dragonfly - it's easy to identify information created in those tables because they already exist by default. But what about for every other module installed that may create and store information that links back to the user that created it? If a user record is deleted, how does one ensure that they will not break one of the other third party modules installed on their site? How does one tell those modules to delete all posts/information in order to avoid creating orphaned information? Does DF currently have the functionality to do this? Do all modules currently created for DF do this? My guess is no.

So, the technical problem would be to somehow create a hook into the core or, if need be, into each module that is activated when a user record is deleted. So when an admin goes through some admin panel feature and whether automatically or manually "prunes" a user from the database, it would have to tell ALL modules on the site that said user's information is being erased and to appropriately alter/remove associated information created by that user from their tables as well. Not an easy task I fear.

Don't get me wrong... I'm all for being able to delete users to save database space and, maybe in some cases, just for the satisfaction of deleting a problem user... heh heh

A synchronization system is scheduled to be build.
Thanks to new features in Dragonfly it will become possible to sync all modules.

Excellent! Then maybe the ability to delete users won't be so far fetched as I may have thought when the synchronization features are developed.