Media can be left with invalid author UIDs if the account is cancelled/deleted

Created on 2 June 2023, over 1 year ago

Updated 16 September 2024, 3 months ago

Problem/Motivation

When canceling a user account, there are several options presented. Two of them are:

"Delete the account and make its content belong to the Anonymous user. This action cannot be undone."
"Delete the account and its content. This action cannot be undone."

If the first option it chosen, media that was owned by the user remains owned by the user, even though the account is deleted. From my brief testing, this didn't cause any immediate issues in browsing the media library, other than the author column in table view showing a confusing blank value.

If the second option is chosen, the user's owned media is not deleted.

Note the File module has the same problem: 🐛 When a user gets "cancelled reassign" uid's in the table file_managed don't get updated to the new uid (0) making them orphaned Needs work

Steps to reproduce

Enable the Media module
Login as "foo" admin user account
Login as the user, and create an Image media entity
Login as a separate "bar" admin user account
Cancel the user account of "foo", and test both options presented above. In both cases, observe the media is not deleted, and the author UID field remains its original value in the database

Proposed resolution

There is a hook we the media module can respond to when this user cancel operation is invoked. It's meant to be used to actually clean up the content author references. The Node module does this, though it has issues;

🐛 Revision user incorrectly appears as anonymous user when node author is cancelled Needs work
🐛 Content moderation can wrongly set old revisions as default when they're resaved Needs review

Remaining tasks

User interface changes

API changes

Data model changes

Release notes snippet

🐛 Bug report

Status

Closed: duplicate

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

Media →

Last updated 1 day ago

Maintained by
🇳🇱Netherlands @seanB
🇩🇪Germany @chr.fritsch
🇺🇸United States @phenaproxima
🇪🇸Spain @marcoscano

Created by

🇺🇸United States bkosborne New Jersey, USA

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Comments & Activities

Issue created by @bkosborne
Status changed to Closed: duplicate 3 months ago8:41pm 16 September 2024
Comment 3 months ago →
🇬🇧United Kingdom Andy Tawse
Looks like the fix will come with https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3043725 ✨ Provide a Entity Handler for user cancelation Needs work which is a generic solution, so marking this one as duplicate.

(Also found there was a similar issue for D9 and a fix which makes the media item anon when saving if it doesn't have an extant author: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3057004 → . That still works for 11.)
Comment 3 months ago →
🇬🇧United Kingdom Andy Tawse

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