WordPress MU

If a USER is permanently deleted 'Site Admin' > 'Users' > 'Delete' , does this also delete all the posts, pages and images that they have ever created.

If so, is it just across that one blog or across all blogs that they have access to.

This particular behaviour would not make sense to me (it should leave all of their content intact), but confirmation either way would be useful as we appear to be missing a whole load of posts, pages and images under exactly these circumstances. Not sure if its just coincidence!

I'm running Wordpress MU 1.3.3 on a VPS (cPanel, Apache setting up parked domains etc), MySQL 4.1.22 (standard)

It's not supposed to, but on the same version of MU. I did find the same thing happened.

And it didn't delete all their posts, which was weird - just most of them.

Hmmm... I have a test install with a bunch of imported posts I need to delete anyway. I'll go delete the user and see if that nukes them.

the way i understand it, if you delete a user, that is all you did. you have to delete the blog to remove posts, pages, images, etc...

hope this helps.

andrea_r beat me by 22 seconds!

Great thanks everyone for your speedy responses.
Andrea_r: I'll be interested to hear your findings in due course.

Turns out I imported them as me. Gonna have to re-import, create the user, then delete them and see hwat happens.

I *do* note that a few months ago, a client did delete some users who were authors on a few sub-blogs and most of their posts disappeared.

I just need to recreate the scenario and verify it.

Yes, upon further investigation, it seems that deleting a user also deletes every post, page or image that they've created/uploaded. Not sure whether it happens across all sites that they've posted to, but then again who knows?

It strikes me this is usual, counter-intuitive and an undesirable(?) feature of WPMU 1.3.3, with a huge potential for data loss. Luckily it didn't catch me out too badly (and we restored from a backup), but it could've been a lot worse!

I'm not sure if there's any point in filing a Trac report for a WPMU 1.3.3 issue as I don't know what the default behaviour is for WPMU 1.5.

Just something for people to be aware of...

Maybe it should be brought to Donncha's attention anyway?

Probably. I really wanted to double-check first.

Edit: I did some quick research on the stand-alone WP and it asks if you want to re-assign the user's posts when you delete them.

So if it;s still doing this in 1.5.x, yeah totally a huge bug.

Ticket filed, but I just thought of something:

has anyone tried removing the user from the blog they are assigned to first? rather than deleting them outright?

Removing the user from the blog should move that user to the main blog. The posts should still stay with the sub-blog in question.

Hmmm.

Interesting thought andrea_r - I'll try that out on my sandpit blog, although the underlying issue (bug?) is still there.

I'd be interested to know Donncha's thoughts...