posted 17 years ago
Currently, you can lock a user account but not remove them. I believe that this is because the user's record id is used in all their posts and a lot of other stuff.
If the user id was deleted then all the user's posts would be deleted and those posts may have replies or be part of a topic. Then those posts would have to be deleted or modified not to reference the delete posts... and there may be some other dependencies too... kind of like the biblical begat thing.
So, the way around this was the path of least resistance...
FWIW, if you want to free up the user id (name), you can go into the DB and change that to something like: foobar-(locked). The numeric id will stay the same and that's what all the dependencies are based on.
[originally posted on jforum.net by monroe]