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Forum Announcements and Comments Announcements about forum changes will be made in this section. All new threads here now require moderator approval. |
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16th Mar 2022, 12:09 pm | #2 |
Moderator
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Oxford, UK
Posts: 27,787
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Re: Posts by 'Guest' ?
You will see this if the member who posted has asked to have their account deleted from the forum. The posts are then attributed to 'Guest'.
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16th Mar 2022, 5:48 pm | #3 |
Moderator
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Fife, Scotland, UK.
Posts: 22,800
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Re: Posts by 'Guest' ?
Some members come to the end of their lives, so they get the 'Resting in peace' status line, and everyone knows what has happened.
Some members lose interest and go off to do other things and just stop posting. They can always come back if they want. But we occasionally get others wondering if they are OK. It's good to see such concern. This is a friendly place. Some members wish to leave, and their logins can be cancelled. Their status comes up as 'No longer a member'. Their posts and details remain. Some members wish to leave and have their personal details and posts removed. We're happy to remove personal details, but removing all their posts would leave a lot of other members with orphaned posts quoting or referring to the ones removed. This makes a mess for other people, so we'd rather leave those posts in place, but just make them anonymous. This way the subject matter flow is intact. So you just see 'guest' as the author of those posts or threads. Some members do something unspeakable, or a commit number of lesser offences, and they get banned. Their name remains, their posts remain (though any unacceptable ones will be removed) and their status line simply says 'Banned'. Again, this is to avoid damage to other people's posts. Only this last one is initiated by moderators. All the others are initiated by the members themselves. A very large number of people have been banned, almost all attempted a single post to place spam on the forum. Their thread or post is removed, they are banned immediately. Similarly, people faking their locations (often the two go together) get banned. None of this shows up on the open forum, so you won't get an idea of how much of this work is done. David
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Can't afford the volcanic island yet, but the plans for my monorail and the goons' uniforms are done |
16th Mar 2022, 11:38 pm | #4 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Lynton, N. Devon, UK.
Posts: 7,060
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Re: Posts by 'Guest' ?
Thanks, David, for the clear explanation!
One slight anomaly is that if the member has posted, and another member quotes their post in a post if their own, and then the first member wants to exit completely, their name then appears as 'Guest' in their posts (as you have explained) but their quote by the second member has their original username above the quoted text. I noticed this today! So by matching the quoted text yo the text in the Guest post, it's possible to see who Guest was, in this case. |
17th Mar 2022, 9:58 am | #5 |
Administrator
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Cardiff
Posts: 9,060
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Re: Posts by 'Guest' ?
The only way to change those would be a manual search and replace query on the posts database table (there are no tools within the forum admin system to change these) and it is generally considered not worth the effort unless the ex-member complains.
The same situation can occur if a username is changed too, with quotes containing the old username still. |