MY database is a great big trash bin.

Over the past several months, I've had some members of this site, join MY site for no apparent reason, other than to create totally useless profiles and tinker around.  All along, I have been simply deleting these nuisance members, thinking that was the end of them.

No such luck.   While perusing my sys_albums table, I noticed that the database record for all the deleted members is still there.  I presume all the garbage photos, and whatever other crap I have no use for, remains in the file system on my server.

News Flash: If I have the need to take the drastic action of deleting a member, it means that the member is a spammer or some other nusiance account that has no business being on my website.  SO.... when I delete that member, I expect all the garbage they left on my site to disappear also.  That includes all the crap they deposited in my file system, and all the records in the DB that were created for the deleted user.

BOONEX: Please put together a Database cleanup utility and add it to admin so we can rid our databases and file systems of the useless garbage deposited by undesirable members.  This cleanup utility all remove all traces of a deleted members activity.

I would like to have this soon.  If this isn't going to be forthcoming from Boonex, it would be a great mod for someone to develop.  I'd rather see it come from Boonex, because everybody needs this.

Please can you specify what tables exactly have traces of deleted members ? I will post ticket, but more info is needed.

So far, it's the sys_albums table.  I'm traveling, so I won't have time to do a thorough check for a few days.  I'll post more details when I have them.

Ticket for this deal:

http://www.boonex.com/trac/dolphin/ticket/1821

there's more to it
let's say a user registers his/her id gets generated ID 7
after deleting their profile/account

new user registers he/she will get an ID 8  shouldn't ID 7 been freed up ?...

bx_spy_data keeps track of all ID's
bx_spy_friends_data

profiles

bottom line if a users is deleted there shouldn't be no trace that user ever existed :)

ID's of deleted users are left all over the place

Auto increment database fields don't work that way.  In fact, in some instances it could be insecure because of issues like this topic brings up.  What happens if there are leftover items from a deleted member & then another member gets their ID after it's deleted?  Those junk files would get associated with those members.

in agreement with JBFB, relational datbases and auto_incremented fields, most specifically when they are unique ID or primary key. the number that is deleted, will never be used again on that database, and no reason for it to be in most cases.

however on the other hand, as houstonlively has discovered and pointed out here, if an ID is deleted, it should also go through the entire database, and remove all associatives with that USERID, now what happens with this could get tricky, if this USERID has created GROUPID, and USERID is Associative to GROUPID, this could inadvertently remove GROUPID, and if there are other members associated with that GROUPID, this could tend to present some problems.

now you may be thinking, this should never get to that point, well in most cases you are correct, but lets consider something:

SCENARIO: johnQ joins a site, is active and participates for lets say 24 months, posting on blogs, in forums, creating threads in the forum, posting to walls on others profiles, commenting on videos and images and audio files, voting on others profiles, creating and joining groups. johnQ has been very active on the site.

Month 25 johnQ quits taking his meds, and wigs out, admin communicates with johnQ about the behavior, and how its not acceptable, johnQ continues with his persistent violation of TOS and AUP, admin needs to delete johnQ's  membership, can you explain what impact this is going to have on the site overall? because you need to know the flow of this. I think we are going to see some serious breakage of the site, if we are already realizing there are issues between the two or three functionalities.

ALEXT and LEONIDs, can you please put this in your consideration.

Regards,

DosDawg

Both valid points.

Perhaps when deleting an account, options as to what goes with the account can also be presented, so by selecting certain options the admin can determine if for instance, forum or blogs or whatever should go as well when the account is removed.

In a case like the Dawg outlined, a ban would probably be a more appropriate action than deleting the account.... until such time as John Q's medication regime gets back on track.   In my case, I just want to completely clear out all the garbage left by nuisance accounts, and it would be nice to have a one click solution for that.

A good content management utility would be a really nice thing to have, where you could view everything a member has ever done on your site, and manage that content.  This would be a great mod, because I don't expect anything this comprehensive from Boonex any time soon.