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What happens when the WP user is deleted?


  • Calvin Powers
    Participant

    @cspowers

    9 years, 8 months ago

    Howdy all,

    Can anyone tell me what happens when an account is deleted? What happens to the Buddy Press / bbPress content that the user created? Is it also deleted? Or does it remain? If it remains is it still associated with the content?

    I setting up a WP site with BuddyPress, bbPress for group forums, and S2 Member.

    What I want to do is let anonymous visitors read everythting in the BuddyPress section of the site. But because they are not logged in, the cannot post. If they buy a membership through S2Member/paypal, they will be allowed to create an account and therefore they will be able to post status and make forum posts etc. So far that sounds easy. I don’t have to set any restrictions in S2 Member. If you have an account, you can post. If you don’t have an account, you can only read.

    But when the user’s subscription expires, S2Member can be configured to demote the user to level 0 / subscriber or the account can be deleted.

    Demoting the user to subscriber doesn’t work in my case because the user can still login and because he can still login, he can continue to post to BuddyPress and bbPress.

    So I’m thinking about seting the S2Member to “delete” the account when the membership expires. But that raises some questions:

    — When a user’s account is deleted, is all of their posted content also deleted? i.e. all the status messages, forum posts etc?

    — Is the user ID available again in the future or is it blocked. For example, suppose John smith signs up, creates the ID JSmith and uses the service for a few months. Then he lets his membership expire and S2Member “deletes” the account. If Jason Smith comes along and pays for an account, can he create an ID JSmith? Or is it no longer available to him because it had previously been used by john Smith?

    Any light that could be shed on this scenario would be appreciated!

    Thanks
    Calvin

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Henry Wright
    Moderator

    @henrywright

    9 years, 8 months ago

    Hi @cspowers

    When a member is deleted, let’s say John Smith jsmith, that username becomes available again. Someone called Jason Smith could indeed register jsmith.

    Content associated with deleted accounts should be deleted but this isn’t always the case. For example, I’ve seen some plugins save info to a user’s account and when that user is deleted, the info remains. As far as actual BuddyPress goes, ‘housekeeping’ on account deletion is performed.


    Calvin Powers
    Participant

    @cspowers

    9 years, 8 months ago

    Thanks @henrywright That’s very helpful. It’s good to know that IDs can be reused. I think it’s probably the right thing to do to delete the user’s content when their account is deleted.


    Henry Wright
    Moderator

    @henrywright

    9 years, 8 months ago

    From the user’s point of view, if they choose to delete their account, then they’d kind of expect their data to be removed. They wouldn’t want the site owner to retain their info once they’re long gone. And from the site-owner’s perspective, they want to keep a ‘clean’ database. Keeping redundant data is bad practice and just wastes space.


    Hugo Ashmore
    Participant

    @hnla

    9 years, 8 months ago

    Why are you not simply using S2 member conditional tags to ensure logged in users can’t perform certain actions around the site like activity updating, accessing groups, posting forum topics, creating posts, you should be able to restrict their activity quite easily until such time as they renew subscription.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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