Delete ALL messages from user

edco

Hi everyone,

A user messaged me and asked me to delete ALL messages he has ever written on the forum.

How do I do that? (I'm still on 0.1.0-beta.11.1)

Thank you in advance!

clarkwinkelmann

edco there's no built-in method to do it. You will have to delete each message manually.

You could mass-delete them via a database edit tool, but it might lead to inconsistencies in meta data (number of discussion replies, etc.)

How many posts do the user have?

Depending on your terms of use, you might have no obligation to delete the posts if they don't contain sensitive data.

CyberGene

How about installing the spamblock extension and flagging the user as a spammer. This will in effect delete all his messages. Nobody will see him flagged as “spammer”, so I doubt he will care about how his posts got deleted.

edco

clarkwinkelmann He has lots of posts (755). So manually deleting is not an option.

Can I completely delete him and also the messages along with it?

CyberGene That might be a good idea, just don't know if I can install it on my old flarum version. I think deleting him would be the easiest.

murdocklawless

delete his account completely. if he wants he can register again.

edco

murdocklawless Thank you. That's what I did. 👍️

CyberGene

I'm under the impression deleting his account will not delete his posts. It will in fact make things even worse since all his posts will remain but their author will be marked as "deleted" or something like that, and then it will make it more difficult for targeted deletion of his posts. Correct me if I'm wrong.

edco

CyberGene The notification prior to deletion said ALL posts will be deleted as well. Haven’t checked it yet.

Umutcan

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/30122-mass-actions
and the spam block plugin may be of use to you.

clarkwinkelmann

The behavior on account deletion might have changed in between Flarum versions.

I believe the current stable version does not delete the user's posts when the profile is deleted.

The Mass Actions extension probably isn't of much use because it's only for discussions at the moment, not posts.

edco

clarkwinkelmann I‘ve just checked, the posts are still ALL there, except that it says from (deleted).

Now I have a bigger problem than I had before.

What do I do now?

clarkwinkelmann

edco if you want to recover the user ID to use in manual SQL query or to delete the posts one by one from the forum UI, you will have to restore a backup.

All posts from deleted users have NULL user ID in the database, so you can't tell which posts belonged to a particular user, unless you know it's the only user that has ever been deleted.

I think the translation might have been wrong for a while, but it has since been fixed.

edco

clarkwinkelmann That is actually bad news. I suspect that when I re-sign him up with the same email address again, it won’t map him to the original messages?

clarkwinkelmann

edco that's correct. The user will have a new user ID if they sign up again, but even if they had the same ID, the relationships have already been set to null by the MySQL foreign key constraints.

ibbxys

I'd just delete all posts from the database that are flagged as deleted. This is how it should be anyhow - true deletion when you click delete. Anything else abuses trust.

edco

ibbxys Thank you. Can you give me a few details, I don‘t want to destroy the database? 🙏🏻

Valeyard

edco I‘ve just checked, the posts are still ALL there, except that it says from (deleted).

Now I have a bigger problem than I had before.

What do I do now?

I'm sorry this has happened. The better option would have been to rename his account to "deleted", remove the user's avatar, reset their email address to garbage like deleted_user1@example.com, then change the password. Now the profile is effectively deleted and you could go about removing the posts. Only then once you're satisfied delete his account entirely.

edco (I'm still on 0.1.0-beta.11.1)

Would recommend you upgrade more regularly!

CyberGene How about installing the spamblock extension and flagging the user as a spammer. This will in effect delete all his messages. Nobody will see him flagged as “spammer”, so I doubt he will care about how his posts got deleted.

Can SpamBlock delete all his messages though, or does it only leave them in the database and hide them?

Eldenroot

Would be nice to add this into the extension 🙂 this is a main feature in other sw boards...

askvortsov

Eldenroot This is planned for the upcoming GDPR extension

ibbxys

edco I'm sorry, this is just a throwaway account for reporting a bug. If this is still relevant: As far as I can tell Flarum has no complex interactions and you can use a regular SQL delete across posts with the user's id. Always backup first though 🙂.