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Dealing with deleted members (Redirects)

  • @hatherley

    Participant

    10 years, 11 months ago

    Hi,

    Google webmaster tools is complaining about 404’s for deleted members. Either they were deleted because of spam or they did it on their own. Since my site has 70k members, manually dealing with this isn’t ideal.

    – Anyone have an automated solution? I’ve got “Quick Page Post Redirect” but I can’t seem to find an option for something like this.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

  • @henrywright

    Moderator

    10 years, 11 months ago

    @hatherley you could do a manual clean-up then going forward disallow members from deleting their account (you can do this under BP Settings in WP Admin)

    @henrywright

    Moderator

    10 years, 11 months ago

    @hatherley just to add – if you allow members to delete their profile then there is no way you can avoid 404s if any inbound links exist to the deleted profile.

    The only effective solution I can think of is to disallow profile deletions (as I mentioned above).

    @hatherley

    Participant

    10 years, 11 months ago

    Thanks for the reply @henrywright

    And by clean-up, you mean redirects? Because one removed member generates a bunch of links (profile, replies, points etc) and it would in my case result in an almost impossible task to do manually 🙁

    @henrywright

    Moderator

    10 years, 11 months ago

    @hatherley redirects is one option. A hackish approach would be to create a new user with the username that was deleted. And just let it sit there idol – as an unused member. That should stop the broken links.

    @ubernaut

    Participant

    10 years, 11 months ago

    i don’t think those 404 should be bothering you. if you have open registration then you will invariably get some amount of spam registration. would you rather have google seeing missing pages or seeing the spammy profiles with links that actually could hurt your ranking? 404 errors in WMT are mainly just to alert you the webmaster that they exist. i do not believe they actually impact your sitewide or page specific ranking at all.

    @henrywright

    Moderator

    10 years, 11 months ago

    @ubernaut The problem is internal broken links – the activity stream might have items in it that aren’t removed that point to a user’s profile. Then there are manual links user’s have posted themselves – @-mentions in activity updates, in activity comments, in blog comments, in blog posts, and inside private messaging threads. The list is quite endless. To my knowledge, there’s no set way of dealing with these remains after an account has been deleted.

    I opened a thread a few days ago in an attempt to perform some housekeeping after a user deletes their account. Didn’t get any responses so I put the idea on hold temporarily.

    https://buddypress.org/support/topic/housekeeping-after-delete-acount/

    @ubernaut

    Participant

    10 years, 11 months ago

    well but wouldn’t that only happen if a user actually mentions the spammer? any activity the spammer themselves made would be removed along with the user. i have never seen anyone mention a spammer.

    @henrywright

    Moderator

    10 years, 11 months ago

    @ubernaut

    I think the OP is also concerned about genuine users deleting their own accounts.

    @ubernaut

    Participant

    10 years, 11 months ago

    yeah ok i guess that does present a UX issue but you can’t really delete or even filter other members content because that will cause bigger problems i think. So unless you talking about re-directing to something which is a 404 but you don’t want to come up as a 404 I’m not sure what could be done.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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