As designed Unexpected behaviour on disabling a User Group Promotion

[Xon]

When disabling a user group promotion, this user group promotion will not be applied to new users. This is expected.

But what is no expected is a disabled promotion can not be unapplied from an account, either by the next login or a manual user group promotion rebuild.

I expected this to allow the usergroup promotion to unapplied, as the user is no longer allowed to be selected by it, not to be come un-removable.

 

[Mike]

I'm not really sure I agree that disabling should remove the group. In most cases, when we deal with disabling something, we prevent it from applying from there forward, rather than undoing its effects. Sort of more like a "pause" option. Deleting a promotion doesn't remove the groups from a user, so it feels to me like disabling doing that would be inconsistent.

I think the most likely action could be just adding an indication of what the disabling action means when editing a promotion. I'm curious what others' thoughts are though as well.

 

[HWS]

Disabling or deleting a user group promotion should remove the promotion from all users.

 

[Xon]

Deleting a promotion doesn't remove the groups from a user, so it feels to me like disabling doing that would be inconsistent.

I wasn't actually expecting this either, but I can understand why this didn't happen before deferred task system existed.

For example, deleting a forum deletes all the threads rather than move them somewhere.

 

[Mike]

I feel somewhat strongly that disabling shouldn't undo the promotion. This would potentially delete a lot of log information (such as who was promoted and when), though I appreciate that may not be that commonly used. It's something that could be triggered accidentally as well (at least given that we have the single click toggle). With the current behavior of deleting the promotion not removing the group, disabling can't behave differently.

Moving onto the behavior when deleting, I think this has to be an admin option, like the behavior when deleting a node. As an example situation, you may be retiring a promotion as you're managing the group changes differently (manually perhaps); removing the group from all users would likely force you to do work. On the basis that deleting wouldn't automatically/always remove the groups, I don't think disabling should either. In the absence of an option (which I don't think really fits a toggle like this), it has to err on the side of not being destructive.

When editing a promotion, I have added a note to make this clear (though it won't appear on the promotion list).