crabpaws Posted December 25, 2013 Share Posted December 25, 2013 My board was upgraded to IPB 3.4.5 this spring. Yesterday, I wanted to review my list of moderators and remove those who were no longer moderators from the moderator group. This is the path I followed: ACP > Member Groups > Manage Member Groups then I clicked on the number for the Moderator group. I found a moderator who had stepped down. Thinking I was editing the Moderator group, I clicked on the DELETE button. Big mistake! Turns out this deletes the member entirely, and this action is all but impossible to reverse. (Yes, you can restore from backup and, depending how old the backup is, lose a bunch of posts and registrations, or edit the database following very daunting instructions here https://www.invisionpower.com/support/kb/_/changing-post-authors-r48 ) Since this is a close-to-irreversible action, clicking on the DELETE button should at least be followed by an alert something like "Are you sure you want to delete this member account entirely? This can be reversed only by installing from backup. DELETE ACCOUNT.....CANCEL" Either that, or retain the account information so it can be restored from the ACP. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ryan Ashbrook Posted December 26, 2013 Share Posted December 26, 2013 It does show an alert box when you click Delete. :) http://screencast.com/t/mIHC9oOnIV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crabpaws Posted December 31, 2013 Author Share Posted December 31, 2013 You can take that to mean delete the member from the Moderator group. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bfarber Posted January 2, 2014 Share Posted January 2, 2014 Deleting a member absolutely should show a confirmation of some sort. If it doesn't, then that's something that has been "fixed" in 4.0 for sure. Delete actions inherently ask for confirmation in 4.0 through a centralized handler. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crabpaws Posted January 2, 2014 Author Share Posted January 2, 2014 The issue is that following this path, ACP > Member Groups > Manage Member Groups > click on Moderator group number it appears you're editing the Moderator group. You don't know a "delete" will delete the member account. The confirm message is generic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crabpaws Posted January 2, 2014 Author Share Posted January 2, 2014 The instructions for undeleting a member provided by Robert Marcher in Changing Post Authors are helpful but do not appear to entirely restore the account. I suggest that IPB provide an undelete member function; even holding deleted member information in a buffer for 15 days would help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bfarber Posted January 3, 2014 Share Posted January 3, 2014 I don't think we're going to do that I'm afraid. We aren't going to retain deleted data everywhere for x days in case someone clicked delete but didn't *really* mean to delete. Don't delete data you might want to retain. ;) And if there was a confirm message and you confirmed, then I'm sorry you inadvertently deleted the user but this was simply confusion and not a deficiency in the software. We'll review the process in 4.0 to see if it's clear enough, but this sounds like an area that's kind of hard to make a whole lot clearer. Your topic title says deleting a member needs a confirm warning, but then you stated that there was a confirm and you confirmed it because you thought you were confirming something else. That's pretty confusing lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Makoto Posted January 3, 2014 Share Posted January 3, 2014 I don't think we're going to do that I'm afraid. We aren't going to retain deleted data everywhere for x days in case someone clicked delete but didn't *really* mean to delete. Don't delete data you might want to retain. ;) Can I stroll off-topic here and ask if that means "there's no hope for you getting a deletion queue for attachments or IP.Downloads files"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crabpaws Posted January 4, 2014 Author Share Posted January 4, 2014 bfarber, thanks for considering this for 4.0. The title says Delete member from Moderator group needs confirm warning! As I explained, I followed a path that seemed to give me a way to remove a member from the Moderator group. I did not take the DELETE button or confirm message to mean I was deleting the member entirely. The user interaction did not make it clear what was going on. It's a usability flaw. Here are a few other people who made the same mistake:Kurt De Pauw http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/394555-change-guest-somename-back-to-original/cyimking http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/394349-get-deleted-member/yevlem http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/385952-accidental-delete-of-the-user/ Given that deleting a member has such drastic consequences, a fail-safe is justified, or at the least a clarified warning message -- which would be applicable to all circumstances of deleting a member. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bfarber Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 If the warning is not clear enough, we can certainly look into making it clearer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crabpaws Posted January 23, 2014 Author Share Posted January 23, 2014 Thank you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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