search

codidact / qpixel

Q&A-based community knowledge-sharing software
https://codidact.com
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
386 stars 68 forks source link

Better management of soft-deleted users #924

Open cellio opened 1 year ago

cellio commented 1 year ago

Posts from users whose profiles have been deleted all show as "deleted user", with no link or user number. Moderators can see deleted profiles if they have the user number, and being able to view those profiles is sometimes helpful in investigating certain kinds of abuse.

This request is to show moderators the user number (e.g. user12345) with a link, instead of "deleted user".

Point for discussion: should we show everyone the number, and only for mods provide the link? Pro: it's more transparent; people can tell that all of these posts were from the same user. Con: user numbers are global, not per-community, so if you delete your profile on one community but have one elsewhere, people can still figure out that was you. That might lead to problems with some European "right to be forgotten" laws; I don't know enough about that to say.

MoshiKoi commented 1 year ago

Con: user numbers are global, not per-community, so if you delete your profile on one community but have one elsewhere, people can still figure out that was you.

We should start seriously considering more fully separating deleted users from the network account. This has been a source of bugs before.

Perhaps we could generate a new user (with a corresponding new ID) whenever someone deletes their account, for the sole purpose of transferring items to that "deleted account" user. This deleted-account user would store somewhere the old user's ID for moderation purposes. This is just an idea though; I'm not sure how feasible it would be.

cellio commented 1 year ago

That's an interesting idea. So, everything from the deleted profile would be moved to the new user, and there'd be bidirectional links for mods? (It would have to be everything, including for example annotation history. And because annotations sometimes cross-link accounts, for example when noting related accounts, there would need to be a path from the deleted profile to the new anonymous one.)

ArtOfCode- commented 1 year ago

The original QPixel did move everything to another account on deletion, and it was a nightmare to manage and caused endless bugs, so I'd be very wary of doing that. It shouldn't be difficult to show a link for mods.

cellio commented 10 months ago

Consider consing up a new (unique) 'user name", stored in addition to the real name in the users table, and using that everywhere instead of "deleted user". Link for mods/admins, plain text for everyone else, and it's a different number so it's not tied to the network user. This would also help with confusing comment threads a la https://meta.codidact.com/posts/288703.