Suspend permanent suspends only for around 5000 days

m4v3rick

If someone gets suspended permanently, the database entry in the user table shows "suspended_until = 2038-01-01".
Is that intended? Why not longer? 🙂

tankerkiller125

m4v3rick It is hardcoded to use that date, however I think, so long as it's set to that value the user is always suspended, even after that date has passed (at least taking a very quick glimpse at the code, I could be wrong)

clarkwinkelmann

I believe we will have to change it at some point. I don't think the users will remain suspended past that date.

Since we use a single column to store the suspension status and since it was made a date column, we don't have any good way of storing "infinite" without adding a second column. The solution chosen was to store a date far into the future.

I am guessing the reason we use January 2038 as the date must be because the suspension date was stored as TIMESTAMP at some point in the past, which has a maximum value of 2038-01-19 03:14:07.

But we have now been using DATETIME to store this value for a long time, so I don't think this technical limitation exists anymore. Now this is probably just a leftover from the early versions of Flarum.

We still have a few more years to decide what to do 😇

m4v3rick

clarkwinkelmann We still have a few more years to decide what to do 😇

I have set a reminder for 2037. 🤓

SKevo

clarkwinkelmann Since we use a single column to store the suspension status and since it was made a date column, we don't have any good way of storing "infinite" without adding a second column. The solution chosen was to store a date far into the future.

What if Flarum would allow NULL on the column that stores the suspension date, which would mean "infinite" suspension, so a new column wouldn't be necessary?

HasanMerkit

clarkwinkelmann

Since we use a single column to store the suspension status and since it was made a date column, we don't have any good way of storing "infinite" without adding a second column. The solution chosen was to store a date far into the future.

Good idea. Adding a column can solves infinite banned(suspented) users. But what about temporary banned users after 2038?

m4v3rick

SKevo

NULL actually means not suspended.

SychO

SKevo it already allows null and it means no suspension. Best to do imo would be extract suspensions into a separate suspensions table because right now we're storing all suspension info in the users table and that's not very normalized. Extracting that info would also allow in the future to see all previous suspensions. We'd only need an active_suspension_id column. And in that case null on suspended_until could be interpreted as infinite.

SKevo

m4v3rick SychO that makes sense, I feel stupid now 🙈

SychO Best to do imo would be extract suspensions into a separate suspensions table because right now we're storing all suspension info in the users table and that's not very normalized. Extracting that info would also allow in the future to see all previous suspensions. We'd only need an active_suspension_id column. And in that case null on suspended_until could be interpreted as infinite.

That's actually a very nice idea and probably the best solution. I am sure that many users would welcome the ability to see past suspensions

m4v3rick

SychO that's not very normalized.

😍
Exactly so.

fakruzaruret

SychO sustainable solution. n:n