Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Deleted accounts

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#1

I’m sorry to say that during the import from the older forums, I missed an option in configuration that let Discourse delete older accounts that were inactive for sixty days. I’m not really sure whether or not it actually got any through that mechanism yet, so I’m still digging. If I find out whether or not that happened, I can always re-import that data. I’ll keep digging, but until then, here’s a quick poll:

  • Reimport forum data, possibly losing new posts
  • Don’t reimport forum data, leave accounts deactivated

0 voters

#2

If at all possible, I’d check to see if you need to re-import first, particularly since it seems people are kind of “moving in” here already.

#3

From a quick look, it appears that posts made by deactivated accounts are still here. That’s the important thing, IMO. So there isn’t gaps in conversations, or the first post of a thread missing. Besides, if someone hadn’t checked in for that long maybe they were ready to move on. It’s one less account for those people floating around out there.

#4

I would be concerned about when that inactivity started. The forums were up, but unusable for a little while, so if it’s counting that as part of the time, people who just hadn’t posted in a few weeks (maybe had just lurked) could have gotten purged.

#5

Well, good news/bad news time!

I did some digging in the SQL dump from the old database and, as far as I can tell, all of these instances of deleted accounts were deleted on the old forums. ‘Deleted’ here means either that the account itself was removed without the posts being removed, or the account was renamed. In both cases, SMF associated a post with a user ID number as well as a username, so that if the user was deleted, it could still display the username. Unfortunately, Discourse does not do the same, so instead, we get posts attributed to ‘system’.

Good news: Discourse did not delete any accounts, or any data at all, really.

Bad news: there’s really not any way to go back through those old posts and add the deleted account names back in.

I’m leaning towards just leaving it as is. I still have the dump, so I can go and look up a user’s name if the problem crops up again, but hopefully it won’t rear its head too often. Worst case, I can figure out a way to go add that information back in programmatically.

#6