Ah, now I get it 
Let´s see ...
DJMaze wrote:
English then
When you delete the user then:
- all pictures still exist in coppermine
Thats right .. ok, afaik the german law only says, that name and email- or postal adress have to be deleted, so that wouldn´t be a problem.
But, on the other hand, it isn´t very difficult to delete all pictures and comments of a certain user from coppermine.
All Pics have their owners_id and the cpg_pictures-table contains the path and the filename for deleting the files, so, no problem there (exept from a few hours work)
Same with the comments ...
Array:
- all forum posts still exist
Now, that's a tricky one ... we solved it that way : the posts stay in the forum, but we change their poster_id to 1 (guest) and the user is deleted from the DB
Array:
- all PM's still exist
No problem .. simply delete all pms with the user_id ...
Array:
- all news comments still exist
They can stay, our law says nothing against that ...
Array:
- all downloads still exist in the downloads module
same as above, but it wouldn´t be a problem to kill these too
Array:
- etc. depending which modules are active
depends on the module, but normaly there shouldn´t be a problem ... and if you, as it is with CPG, setup rules for modules to work with CPG, it should be possible to add a standard for deleting users ...
Array:
Now what we do with this all ?
- notify admin he deleted itself and you go dive in each module to delete everything
definitely not ... thats the case in CPG today, and we want to change that, don´t we ?
Array:
- make a delete system php file inside each module that will handle the deletes and will probably fail due to the PHP 30 seconds limit
Exactly that ... and i don´t see, why this should fail .. as I said, most of the operations are simple SQL-Instructions, wich aren´t affected by the 30 sec. limit ... I think you must have a gallery with, let´s say several hundreds of pics from one user, to reach the limit during a delete-operation ...
Array:
To me a option similar to delete should be available for members so they can "suspend" themselves.
A full deletion gives you a lot of fun editing and finding everything.
Suspend might work, but I´m not sure, that this would go with our law ... and the law is our problem 
Array:
Oh and what if someone re-uses the nickname and you deleted the member due to his mis-behaviour ?
Then everyone hates him already.
Well, thats something that I've been thinking about for some time .. well, thats absolutely no problem ...
as you surely know, CPG already uses a system to prevent users from choosing usernames like Admin, owner, god ect. ($DeniedUserNames)
if you would change this array to a DB-table, it would be easy to put every deleted username in this table, so it can´t be reused by another person.
