0003413: Deleting users causes confusion in old bugs

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update
0003413	mantisbt	bugtracker	public	2003-11-11 20:22	2005-07-23 02:25

Reporter	Eric Seppanen	Assigned To	thraxisp
Priority	normal	Severity	minor	Reproducibility	always
Status	closed	Resolution	duplicate

Summary	0003413: Deleting users causes confusion in old bugs
Description	A system administrator here deleted the accounts of several people who no longer work here. This caused all bugs which those users appeared in, as reporters, owners, or in bugnotes, to show "user no longer exists", causing great confusion. I had to go into the database and manually restore the users just so that I could view old bugs and make sense of the bugnotes. In my opinion it would be better to preserve the name of old accounts rather than actually destroying the records. The account could be tagged so it doesn't show up in the account list. Actually deleting them just causes too much damage to old bugs. Alternatively, the pain this causes would be minor if there were a way to "undelete" users. You could migrate the users to a "deleted users" table or just tag them as "deleted". At a minimum a warning should be added to the delete-users procedure so that someone about to delete a user understands that this will retroactively go back and remove that person's name from all old bugs.
Tags	No tags attached.

vboctor 2003-11-11 22:37 manager ~0004728	The enable/disable user account is there to allow you to disable accounts without deleting them from the database. Hence, I don't see a need to implement anything extra. However, a warning can be added for code that deletes users.

Eric Seppanen 2003-11-11 23:15 reporter ~0004729	I might rephrase the question: why allow deleting users at all? It seems like a fairly dangerous feature. I bet at least one in four sysadmins would make the mistake ours did.

vboctor 2003-11-12 22:09 manager ~0004737	ok, I think we can do the following: Add a configuration option to disable deleting users and disable it by default. Prompt the user with a warning before users are deleted.

epu 2003-12-13 03:02 reporter ~0004800 Last edited: 2003-12-13 03:02	suggest also disabling email links to users who are disabled. marking as confirmed. edited on: 12-13-03 03:02