[isf-wifidog] Deleting users

[Benoit Grégoire]

> I assume you're kidding here, of course. We do need a way to let
> people resend their registration. 

Don't worry, there IS a "re-send my validation email" button.

> It would also be a good idea to 
> make the statistics table NOT foreign key dependent. That's one
> common practice for reporting and statistics data modeling.
>
> And yes, I know that this means that there might be some orphaned
> statistics entries, but I've found it better to decouple live system
> data from archival reporting data. If the user is still live, you can
> always connect the records using the user_id, even if its not foreign
> key dependent.

The problem with de-coupling is that it will cause a lot of code to 
potentially go wrong, for no tangible benefit.  The problem isn't the foreign 
key, as we really dont want all traces of the account to be deleted during 
normal operations.  I have a solution for this, but it's far from a priority, 
it's part of the larger problem of stale accounts.

The idea is to create a new account status (ACCOUNT_STATUS_DELETED), hash the 
email adress so it can't be recovered, but if someone want's to open an 
account with the same name, that account will be reactivated, preventing 
people form leaving and re-joining without any trace that it's the same user.

That being said, in the meantime if someone wants to send a schema update to 
change the constraint from ON DELETE RESTRICT to ON DELETE CASCADE, I have no 
objections (this will allow to simply call "DELETE id FROM users).  I also 
have no objections to a patch allowing a super-admin (not the network admin) 
to completely delete a user by calling a new function 
User::deleteCompletely(), as long as there is a confirmation step notifying 
that this isn't a normal procedure, ant that it will remove all traces of any 
connection by this user in the logs.  


-- 
Benoit Grégoire, http://benoitg.coeus.ca/
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