How do I keep names associated with posts when a user account has been deleted?

allididntwantto

Here's the deal...

I have a message board type system. There is a users table and a posts table in the database. In the posts table there is a column named user_id. This corresponds to a user id in the users table. When a post is displayed the post table is joined to the users table to look up the posters name etc. How can I design the database so that when a user account is deleted their name will still be displayed with the post?

TIA for your advice folks! 🙂

Simon Plenderleith

xblue

Two approaches that I think are fairly common:

a) flag them "disabled", "inactive" or whatever instead of deleting them.

b) rewrite your query so that it would display the user name replaced with some informational, while general message like "(user unknown)" or something.

What's more suitable for your application (or if none of it at all), well, you should know better then I ever could.

Roger_Ramjet

If your user accounts require a login then re-setting their password is the quickest way to disable an account without deleting the information. You can use a special code that you trap for if you want added security, that way if someone hacks the new password you will still lock them out.

Bear in mind that if you are deleting the account, then a simple join on the 2 tables is going to miss the user's posts even though you have not deleted them as well.