CUNY Academic Commons

Thank you for this, Colin and Boone.

Chris Stein and I were also wondering: Could there be a way to merge (the content of) accounts, instead of deleting one account?

And, related to https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/18982, should we routinely try to reassign all page and post authors to a current team member, every time a team member leaves? Regarding media, and most recent edits to other authors' posts--which we found got deleted on one of our sites when Juwon deleted her account--how would we even reassign those elements?

I'll try to assemble a description of what happens on user deletion in the next few days, unless Ray beats me to it.

During our call today, we talked about a couple of changes to user deletion that we might consider:

- In the short term, we might change the confirmation page so that it summarizes the specific content that will be deleted. This can include a summary of group memberships and content (forum posts, files, etc), as well as a summary of the user's sites, with a description of what will happen to their content on each of those sites. In cases where the action is destructive - content is deleted irrevocably - we can give instructions or point to documentation on how to back it up, export it, or reassign authorship. The process of assembling this information for display will be a bit finicky, but because it'd be purely informational (no internal toggles, etc) it should be somewhat straightforward to implement in the shorter term.
- We might expand on this first item by providing tools right on the confirmation page that will help the user deal with content. For example, each of a user's sites might have a dropdown/radio that allows the user to select whether their content on that site is deleted, trashed, or reassigned.
- Colin suggested a system where content associated with a deleted user is not deleted immediately, but instead is put into some "trash" state for a set amount of time - say, 30 days - before being deleted altogether. This is technically complicated, in part because there are so many types of content, and many of them don't have the concept of "trash". So it would be a longer-term possibility.

The first step here is to summarize exactly what currently happens on the Commons when a user deletes their own account. This will include BP content (profile, friendships, group memberships, group content like docs/files/forums) as well as WP content (site memberships, sites where the user is the sole member, sites where the user is the sole admin, sites where the user's content could be reassigned, etc).

Hi all,

We have a follow-up question: I had recommended that Juwon add one Commons account user to each site, promote herself to admin, then remove the user account she had planned to delete from each site.

However, I followed up on that, and Juwon told me that she did not remove the first user account from any of the sites before deleting the account.

If she had done that--removed the user she deleted from all sites (as admin)--would her site content not have been deleted?

Maybe the answer to this could be taken into account for the updated account text deletion wording?

I'm unsure of the precise answer to your question, Syelle, but I can say with some certainty that content deletion depends not on who's an admin of a site, but instead on who is the author (the post_author column in the posts table) of the content. I'm unsure how we'd capture your precise situation (which seems pretty complicated?) in the account deletion language. But I think that what we can include is best practices for group sites, which might involve a certain list of things (like manually reattributing content) you can do in order to preserve content. This latter language would probably help to mitigate confusion in cases like yours.