n/a after deleting a user [#23929]

Content of a deleted user is not visible anymore. n/a is displayed instead.

Please read the message below which is a copy of the text which I posted to one of the forums.

Last week I deleted some registered users from our site. These users had created some content (book page/story) in the past. After deleting these users, the nodes they created were not visible anymore; a n/a message was displayed instead. After changing the uid of the nodes to the uid of an existing user, the nodes were visible again.

Bug or feature?
Is the behavior as described above the intended behavior of Drupal? In our situation it is considered a bug that content is not visible because the user who created the content doesn't exist anymore.

We reassigned the content to another (existing) user by manipulating the MySQL database directly but this is not the way it should be done.

How should this problem (to me it is) be solved?

At the moment I don't delete but block a user after he/she created content. This is an undesirable situation for us but I think it will work.

At the moment we are at 4.5 but we have the intention to upgrade to 4.6 next week.

Comment	File	Size	Author
#4	orphan_nodes_0.module	2.13 KB	jadwigo
#2	orphan_nodes.module	2.09 KB	jadwigo

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Comments

Comment #1

jadwigo CreditAttribution: jadwigo commented 28 December 2005 at 11:25

Version:

» 4.6.4

Maybe some "orphan nodes" interface should be created in the admin/content section where nodes from non-existant users, and nodes from non existant node-types show up.. in order for them to be either deleted or reassigned. (similar to orphan book pages)

The n/a message is very impractical, because you need to manually change the nodes to get rid of it... and website visitors will only be puzzled by it.

(this applies to 4.6.x also)

Comment #2

jadwigo CreditAttribution: jadwigo commented 28 December 2005 at 12:47

Component:	base system	» node system
Status:	Active	» Needs review

File	Size
orphan_nodes.module	2.09 KB

This is a simple module that shows a list of nodes without existing authors to users with 'administer nodes' permission.
Those users can edit the nodes or delete them without needing to manually go into the database.