Not planned Add Rebuild IDs to Tools > Rebuild Caches

[Amaury]

I think this would be useful if, say, you remove a lot of spam bots, which results in a large ID gap.

It would rebuild based on the date of threads, registration, etc. For example:

• User ID 1: Legitimate user joined on March 20, 2014
• User IDs 2-9: Spam bots joined on March 21, 2014
• User ID 10: Legitimate user joined on March 22, 2014

Rebuilding user IDs would make user ID 10 user ID 2 and any future registrations will start at user ID 3.

Or if IDs got changed when importing:

• User ID 1: Joined on March 25, 2014
• User ID 2: Joined on March 20, 2014

User ID 2 is actually user 1, but got changed around when importing. Rebuilding IDs would give user ID 1 to user 1 again.

 

[Jeremy]

This would essentially continually break links to your site, quotes, and plenty of other features. It isn't as easy as you suppose it is.

 

[Chris D]

Also the benefits of such a thing are miniscule. I mean, what actually is the point? Is the gap in numbers a problem? It really isn't important.

 

[Amaury]

This would essentially continually break links to your site, quotes, and plenty of other features. It isn't as easy as you suppose it is.

Oops. I actually forgot to write about that in my post. I know it wouldn't be easy to do, but running this would also deal with links already posted on the forum.

Also the benefits of such a thing are miniscule. I mean, what actually is the point? Is the gap in numbers a problem? It really isn't important.

Not at all. You're correct. I mean, the same thing could be said for things like bold, italicize, and underline. Do we really need them?

It's just something I thought would be useful.

 

[Paul B]

What about existing indexed links on external sites?

Those would either no longer work or resolve to a different member.

Reusing IDs for an existing forum for any content, be it members, thread, posts, etc. is a bad idea.

 

[Jeremy]

It really isn't as easy as you would think and would be quite time consuming and nearly impossible to cover all the bases.

 

[Amaury]

What about existing indexed links on external sites?

Those would either no longer work or resolve to a different member.

Good point. I thought of links already posted on the forum, but oversaw links posted on external sites.

Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to work around that.

It really isn't as easy as you would think and would be quite time consuming and nearly impossible to cover all the bases.

Yeah, I guess this was a bad idea.

I remember I asked the same question on vBulletin.org and was given similar responses, I think. I thought it might be possible on XenForo since it's structured differently, but I guess not.

 

[Mike]

Changing IDs is never something I'd recommend to people. If you really want to redo them, then I'd have to recommend a reimport, but consider all the side effects of that.