Currently, all messages imported from netnews are owned by one user, specified in the netnews link. Though it is possible to enter a different name and email address into each comment, these will not show up in the overview of a forum. The only way to do that is to set the uid of the comment to 0. That will destroy the ownership of those comments, and thus make it harder to do things like remove all comments that came in through a newsgroup.
Although I consider the option to create users for netnews messages a very good way to pollute a sites user administration beyond rescue, I can imagine that people will prefer it over other options. So it needs to be implemented

Comments

mork’s picture

mork commented

eek! I strongly agree that this would create an unmanagable user database. I wonder, what are the disadvantages to having each imported message assigned to uid 0?

For the name, it should perhaps be configurable. I imagined if the post was made on usenet you might take the posters name and use it in addition to a admin selectable text.

For example, if 'mork' posted in some newgroup and we're importing it, perhaps it would be uid 0 with name 'mork (via usenet)' or 'mork (via alt.whatever)'.

If the need to remove all imported messages from a newsgroup were to come up, a query could be devised to delete all records where the name contained '(via ...)'.

To me, this is a better alternative than creating users for incoming messages.. the thought of that is scary.

mork’s picture

mork commented

If you do add the ability to create users for incoming posts, I beg you to make it optional in the admin area :)

janb’s picture

janb commented

Don't worry... creating new users will be admin configurable. It can be useful in situations where the newsgroup is private (so not a usenet group, that would indeed be *very* scary).
So far, I assigned all messages to an admin configurable user id. But then this user shows up as owning all netnews messages. Not very informative. Afaik, when I assign comments to uid 0, the show up as from 'Anonymous' in overviews, not very informative either.

ericatkins’s picture

ericatkins commented

I agree. This is a feature that should be included.