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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #11894 is a reply to message #11893] |
Tue, 22 July 2003 01:32   |
Ilia
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Nope, one by one is the way to go. You could hack around it by setting the accounts of these members to non-confirmed. Then eventually the forum will delete those accounts automatically.
FUDforum Core Developer
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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #11896 is a reply to message #11895] |
Tue, 22 July 2003 02:30 |
Ilia
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Deletion of members should not be a quick process, since there is no possiblity of recovery. This will lead to lot's of accidental deletions and many other problems.
FUDforum Core Developer
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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #11897 is a reply to message #11896] |
Tue, 22 July 2003 02:54 |
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creamywf
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True, but a right click on a member name and a yes/no verification would suffice. It does for a lot of more important stuff with programs!
The way it is now, you have to go to admin panel, then to moderator/user management, then type in the name, hit ok, then scroll down to the bottom of the page, and then hit delete.
Then you have to go back, type in the next name, hit ok...then scroll down to the bottom of the page, and then hit delete....
It's TOO much!
You can delete everything on your hard drive easier than deleting a member here!
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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #11903 is a reply to message #11897] |
Tue, 22 July 2003 13:18 |
Ilia
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Ok, but let's consider the sort of functionality you want. As I understand it you want to delete users who's verified account is older then a certain date. I say a verified account, because unverified accounts are automatically deleted after speficied number of days in the admin control panel. Now, I suppose we could say that you consider 'inactive' user a user who did not post any messages. There maybe many active users who are members but simply choose to lurk on the forum and/or converse via private messages why delete their accounts?
So, my first question is what do you wish to gain by deleting those accounts, you certainly don't suffer any performance issues due to a few unused accounts. The second question is how do you reliably determine an unused account? Heck, a person could've went on vacation and came back 3 weeks later to find their account gone due to lack of activity, that just does not happen in any other application I am aware of.
FUDforum Core Developer
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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #11915 is a reply to message #11912] |
Tue, 22 July 2003 19:43 |
Ilia
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Deleting users with 0 posts, imho is a bad approach for reasons I've previously explained.
FUDforum Core Developer
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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #11922 is a reply to message #11903] |
Tue, 22 July 2003 20:50 |
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creamywf
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| prottoss wrote on Tue, 22 July 2003 09:18 |
Ok, but let's consider the sort of functionality you want. As I understand it you want to delete users who's verified account is older then a certain date. I say a verified account, because unverified accounts are automatically deleted after speficied number of days in the admin control panel. Now, I suppose we could say that you consider 'inactive' user a user who did not post any messages. There maybe many active users who are members but simply choose to lurk on the forum and/or converse via private messages why delete their accounts?
So, my first question is what do you wish to gain by deleting those accounts, you certainly don't suffer any performance issues due to a few unused accounts. The second question is how do you reliably determine an unused account? Heck, a person could've went on vacation and came back 3 weeks later to find their account gone due to lack of activity, that just does not happen in any other application I am aware of.
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We had over 130 members that had registered but not posted in over 6 months, some not in a year and a half. Our active members (a few hundred) put a lot of effort into their posts and don't appreciate lurkers/voyeurs.
The main reason for deleting though, was that we are a controversial community and we have gotten quite a few people that lurk under various fake member names (so they have several accounts) and sometimes do things like post people's real names and addresses, etc. We are a big community, which has several AOL chat rooms, and where many have known each other for years and years. When someone gets into a fight with someone else, they sometimes use the forum as a way to mess with people, and they use fake names to do wrong things on our forum. The IP addresses don't seem to help, they obviously have some way around that. They just keep joining under new names.
So every now and then, we clear off the forum of old member names.
We would like to have some way of moderating new registrants, but our version is 2.3.3 and apparently doesn't have that feature and we just paid a lot of money for the upgrade not that long ago. We can't afford to upgrade every time there is a new release.
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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #11924 is a reply to message #11923] |
Tue, 22 July 2003 21:51 |
Ilia
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I am not saying there are no situations where deletion a large number of forum members is not waranted. However, in most cases I do not see a neeed for such a feature. Especially since my fear is that it would lead to accidental deletions that are completely unrecoverable.
At the moment you have 2 ways to handle the situations:
1) Delete members 1 by one
2) Connect to the database used by the forum and mark all of the accounts you want to remove as 'un-confirmed' and the forum will delete them automatically within a few days.
To do this you need run a query that looks something like this:
UPDATE fud21_users SET email_conf='N' WHERE login IN('login1', 'login2', ...);
FUDforum Core Developer
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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #11925 is a reply to message #11924] |
Tue, 22 July 2003 22:32 |
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creamywf
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| prottoss wrote on Tue, 22 July 2003 17:51 |
I am not saying there are no situations where deletion a large number of forum members is not waranted. However, in most cases I do not see a neeed for such a feature. Especially since my fear is that it would lead to accidental deletions that are completely unrecoverable.
At the moment you have 2 ways to handle the situations:
1) Delete members 1 by one
2) Connect to the database used by the forum and mark all of the accounts you want to remove as 'un-confirmed' and the forum will delete them automatically within a few days.
To do this you need run a query that looks something like this:
UPDATE fud21_users SET email_conf='N' WHERE login IN('login1', 'login2', ...);
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I disagree. It's an area that needs to be looked at in my opinion. Control of membership is important. Right now when you delete a member, their past posts if any, show up as GUEST.
We've had situations where moderators got upset with someone and deleted hundreds of posts while we were scrambling around trying to figure out how to shut her off. The groups manager takes a while....you have to add her then shut off her delete priviledges. Going to the admin panel and blocking her or deleting her also takes time.
There are many examples. Just because you personally aren't involved in situations where that ability is important doesn't mean it's not important to many others.
Why have hundreds of members on your forum that have never used it and never come back after signing up? It artificially inflates your actual membership and makes management of member problems more difficult.
As for the argument that it would make accidental deletion easy, that is just not the case. Taking 2-3 steps to delete a membership instead of 14 just makes more sense period. If you can easily'accidentally' delete a membership in 2-3 steps, how can you possibly be managing a forum in the first place?
Anyway, just my view of it here from one user's world.
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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #11930 is a reply to message #11925] |
Tue, 22 July 2003 23:21 |
Ilia
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A moderator can delete messages, yes. But ultimately they can only do so 1 topic at a time at most and each time will go through a confirmation page. Only the administrator can potentially delete an entire forum worth of messages, and even then the forum and it's contents are only deleted if the forum trash bin is cleared (Deleted Forums).
Let's consider member XYZ who is a lurker. XYZ is registered because they want to be able to customize the view of the message, perphaps switch the forum into a different language and use many other features restricted to members. On technical forums many users will simply be lurkers because they are mainly there to read and get ideas with a relatively small number actually doing all the talking. And there are numerous reasons why a member may go inactive for an extended period of time.
Well, how do you propose to delete a mass group of members? Have a text box where you could paster their login names separated by spaces? Delete all members who did not visit the forum for X amount of days/months/years? Delete members who have not posted any messages? I am genuinly intrested in how would go about deleting a large group of users.
FUDforum Core Developer
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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #11931 is a reply to message #11930] |
Tue, 22 July 2003 23:38 |
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creamywf
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| prottoss wrote on Tue, 22 July 2003 19:21 |
A moderator can delete messages, yes. But ultimately they can only do so 1 topic at a time at most and each time will go through a confirmation page. Only the administrator can potentially delete an entire forum worth of messages, and even then the forum and it's contents are only deleted if the forum trash bin is cleared (Deleted Forums).
Let's consider member XYZ who is a lurker. XYZ is registered because they want to be able to customize the view of the message, perphaps switch the forum into a different language and use many other features restricted to members. On technical forums many users will simply be lurkers because they are mainly there to read and get ideas with a relatively small number actually doing all the talking. And there are numerous reasons why a member may go inactive for an extended period of time.
Well, how do you propose to delete a mass group of members? Have a text box where you could paster their login names separated by spaces? Delete all members who did not visit the forum for X amount of days/months/years? Delete members who have not posted any messages? I am genuinly intrested in how would go about deleting a large group of users.
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Just as Admins only can see invisible members, something could be set up that when you go into the "MEMBER" area, and Admin (and ONLY an Admin) could right click on a member name for options, one of which could be delete membership. There could be other member management options there as well. This would still necessitate going through the whole list, but wouldn't be as onimous as having to print out that list, then go to the admin panel and type in each name you want to delete, then go to the bottom of the form, click delete, and then start over for the next name. That list under "MEMBERS" is also sortable by number of posts, date joined, member name, etc., and could be a gold mine for member management functions. Plus, something could be added to the effect of a popup to verify that you want to delete yes/no before it is actually deleted.
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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #11937 is a reply to message #11931] |
Wed, 23 July 2003 01:49 |
Ilia
Messages: 13241
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Hmm... Intresting approach, it actually should be pretty workeable. I'll look into, if implementational details don't prove to be a problem I'll add it to upcomming 2.5.1.
FUDforum Core Developer
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| Re: Deleting Old Members [message #12022 is a reply to message #11931] |
Thu, 24 July 2003 22:29 |
Ilia
Messages: 13241
Registered: January 2002
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FYI:
I've just added the edit, delete, ban/unban links to the member list allowing the administrator to quickly perform these actions on the listed users. This feature will be avaliable in the 2.5.1 release.
Thanks for being persistent and coming up with this idea.
FUDforum Core Developer
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