Deleting System..

[AmigoJack]

This should never go into phpBB. Find a DBMS which does what you want - that'd be the best approach.

Real-life-examples would be:

• Telephone numbers: old ones shouldn't be re-used (at least for a while) so people (still) dialing the number aren't confused about the unexpected person on the other end.
• Insurance numbers: the life history would be mixed up of all owners.
• Program versions: nobody would expect 1.0 to be a successor to 2.3.
• Law paragraphs: avoiding chronological confusion, plus it would make everything unnecessary complex (even more).

In the end the reason is always: historical inconsistency.

[bantu]

An id is a unique identifier for an object in a system (in this case a phpBB installation). Reusing an identifier after the associated object has been deleted violates the uniqueness property of an identifier.

[Dragosvr92]

You both do have a point. But, considering that the last person registered is NOT An important member, and just a spammer. No one would have a link bookmarked to the person, considering it must be just a spammer.

It should be deleted and be seen as it was never there. Just my opinion, its ok if others do not agree

[doktornotor]

You both do have a point. But, considering that the last person registered is NOT An important member, and just a spammer. No one would have a link bookmarked to the person, considering it must be just a spammer.

It should be deleted and be seen as it was never there. Just my opinion, its ok if others do not agree

Umh... Your OP proposes doing this for posts and topics as well. That is confusing like hell, if a topic/post is gone, it is gone and should not all of a sudden link to a random "next" one. Even if we reduce the idea to user IDs alone, I can well imagine the IDs being linked via some antispam forums (SFS etc.)

[Dragosvr92]

StopForumSpam doesnt care what the page of the user is on different forums. They just need the spammer ip, email, username.

[AmigoJack]

I think your main (psychological) problem is that most IDs are ascending ordinals. If phpBB would use literals (i.e. hashes based on username plus/or e-mail-address) as indices nothing would be lost or wasted by not using one of those indices anymore. Same goes for everything else: forums, topics and posts could have hashes based on their creation time...

[Ger]

I think the main question would be: what's the gain?
IMHO, there is no gain, but there would be loss if such a system (either hashing or reusing id's) is used, since it will slow down performance and it will result in possible inconsistent data.

[callumacrae]

I think the main question would be: what's the gain?
IMHO, there is no gain, but there would be loss if such a system (either hashing or reusing id's) is used, since it will slow down performance and it will result in possible inconsistent data.

Hashing is a lot cleaner, and is used a lot in NoSQL systems. I haven't really seen it used in MySQL, but it still works.

[DavidIQ]

Hashes are not recommended for use in SQL Server and Microsoft discourages its use as primary key identifiers.