SBP indexing users - delete after indexing or allow name change

I just checked into the core Drupal 6.x user blocks.

The Who's New block does not show users whose status is 'blocked'.

The Who's Online block joins users from the users table to sessions in the sessions table, and doesn't explicitly check for the status of users (since normally blocked users can't log in, it probably seems unnecessary).

So what I've just done is to set up Search by Page so that it doesn't store sessions while it's indexing pages. That should fix the Who's Online block.

As far as the other concerns in the thread: one thing you can do is rename the Search by Page user(s) to something else so that it doesn't look odd. Search by Page doesn't care what the user name is. Or you can modify the contributed modules you are using so that they don't create galleries (or show them) for users who are blocked. The core User module already won't show user profiles for blocked users (except if you are an administrator). Other modules should do similar things, and if they don't, in my opinion it's a bug.

Here's the patch... will commit shortly to the development branch.

The tests pass in my testing environment - there seems to be something seriously wrong with the testing bot's environment right now, not sure what. So I committed this change to the development 6.x version of Search by Page.

I've also committed this fix to the Drupal 7 development version of Search by Page. The patch is pretty much the same, except the function is called drupal_save_session() instead of session_save_session().

I would just add that I'm open to the idea of deleting users after indexing content. But I'm a bit worried about whether it will (a) fix the problem reported with these users showing up in various places and (b) cause other problems. So... if someone writes a patch and reopens this issue, I'll reconsider, but until now I'm tentatively saying no.

Hmmm. SBP should just create the user once, then continue to use it (one user per role you've asked for in indexing). Once the user has been created, you can definitely change the name from the user management screen in Drupal, and it shouldn't affect SBP.

Anyway, I do see your point. Let's leave this issue open as a feature request to either have SBP delete its temporary users after indexing, or to have the ability to change the dummy user names to something else.

I would also like to point out that setting users to "blocked" rather than deleting them is a common practice of Drupal site webmasters for dealing with spammers. The reason is that Drupal requires email addresses to be unique, so a blocked user cannot re-apply with the same email address. Of course in today's world it's not that hard to get another email address... but still, it is a fairly common practice (for instance, drupal.org webmasters do that).

It's also fairly simple to modify a module to understand "blocked" status. All you have to do is find the database queries on the {users} table and add a status = 1 WHERE clause to them.